In her 2014 “Italica” article, “Who Did It? The Mysterious Murder of the History of Italian Literature” (Vol. 91, # 3, pp. 255-276), University of Colorado Italian Studies Professor Cosetta Seno reports on the findings of her study of American Ph.D Italian Studies' ‘reading lists’ for the period 1960 to 2010. A literature teacher herself, understandably the title of Prof. Seno’s article has a dramatic flair. But don’t be fooled! The project she reports on was rigorously empirical, analytical and statistically systematic. She “gathered a large number of reading lists from several random universities.” The objective of the project was undertaken to determine: (1) “Italian authors studied”, (2) “how long they were kept in the canon”, (3) “whether their works were read in complete or anthologized form”, and (4) “any other changes resulting from modifications in course requirements.” The study was undertaken at the behest of her “Italian colleagues interested in Italian literature studies in the United States over the five decades in question”. /// /// Further, having passed on the result of her research to her [Italian] colleagues, she was “tempted to share my observations with American Italianisti colleagues hoping to have them look into some of the problems I see, so that we can exchange some concerns and propose changes that would be beneficial to our programs.” /// /// To my mind: it is interesting (indeed fascinating) to note that the interest and motivation for the study of American university Italian Literature “syllabi” came from Italians (i.e. in Italy); not American educators. Also, note the trepidatious wording of the decision to share the result of her research with "American Italianisti colleagues": “TEMPTED to share”… “HOPING to have them look into some of the problems I see…” Seemingly, the American Italian literature teachers have no curiosity, concern or even awareness about pedagogic problems in teaching Italian literature. Especially interesting, to students of the American pedagogic wastelands, their apparent blasé attitude about teaching is not limited to teaching Italian literature. Literature scholar and teacher Camille Paglia has, as is her style, railed against contemporary methods of teaching literature, in all genre at all levels of the American education system (e.g. see http://www.c-span.org/video/?115418-1/american-education-reform) /// /// Significantly, to my mind, Prof. Seno’s study was not simply undertaken at the behest of her colleagues in Italy. She herself, I ‘judge’, is native Italian: her first name is not American, her undergraduate degree is from the ‘North of Rome’ University of Macerata and her speech is heavily Italian accented (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVBfK8g0VE); also, of the 14 publications [two books and 12 articles) listed in her University of Colorado curriculum vitae, there are only two English language publication. //// /// And yet the problems this Italian scholar sees in American Italian literature studies, exactly match those observed by Southern-Italian American professor Paglia; i.e. the failure to teach literature in the context of the history of literature. The history of literature manuals once ubiquitous in both the teaching of Italian literature (Seno) and literature generally (Paglia) are now virtually extinct; replace by aesthetic theories such as ‘structuralism’, ‘semiotics’, etc. Seno writes: “Today Italian literature seems to be simply literature, and one can and should read D’Annuzio as s/he would read Proust or Joyce. Literature is seen as ‘universal’ and its historic idiosyncrasies have been sacrificed to abstract methods of interpreting literary facts”. And, Paglia says: “the sense of chronology is completely gone … the sense of chronology is completely missing from the humanities faculty.” (all Seno quotes: p. 255-6)