Reexamines the notion of the "hyphenate writer," and offers a specific reading strategy that we may consider the Italian/American writer in the age of semiotics, poststructuralism, and the like.

Using semiotics as a theoretical foundation, this book reexamines the notion of the hyphenate writer. It argues for an analogous set of categories no longer chronologically or generationally based, but cognitively based, so that the traditionally considered "first-stage" or first-generation hyphenate writer now figures as an "expressive" writer who is not necessarily part of the immigrant or first American-born generations. He or she may actually belong to a later generation and write about his or her ethnicity with those characteristics more readily associated with the first-stage hyphenate writer.