"Getting the Other 'Into the Picture'. Review of (and comment on) Dominic Stewart’s, Crossing the Cultural Divide: An Englishman in Italy"

Prof. Dominic Stewart's book, "Crossing the Cultural Divide: An Englishman in Italy," was intended to be humorous, and certainly succeeded. On the other hand, however, the text -- perhaps unavoidably given Prof. Stewart’s interests and academic pursuits -- wanted to show how a foreigner becomes acculturated when he or she finds himself in a foreign land, and over a good period of time. In my article, I make two points: 1) that on the one hand, Stewart’s particular form of humor subverts the attempt to “get serious,” does not allow the Italian “other” to “enter” the world / frame of the “foreign” Englishman, and remains funny by keeping him or her “at bay;” and 2) on the other hand, Stewart is quite aware of this problem, which gets set forth in about the middle of his book in an exquisite chapter of five pages, entitled, “Bella Figura” in which he stages how, with a certain violence, an Italian “other” finally breaks into the frame of the English “other.”