Angelo Monaco | Università degli Studi di Bari (original) (raw)

Books by Angelo Monaco

Routledge, 2024

Water Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our... more Water Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water crisis. Water scarcity, droughts, floods, deluge, rising sea levels, ice melting, wetlands loss and sea pollution are among the main threats posed by climate change, wreaking havoc on both human and nonhuman forms of life. This book engages with instances of extreme events related to water (droughts, floods, deluges) and the impact of climate change on some waterbodies (seas and wetlands) in contemporary Anglophone novels. By taking into account a corpus of novels ranging from the various areas of the Anglophone world, and thus shuttling between the Global North and the Global South, the book reads these novels as "water stories." This volume pays attention to the pervasive presence of water in all aspects of our lives, thus showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis. Alternating between an econarratological perspective, reflections on the Anthropocene and the human/nonhuman imbrications within the blue humanities, the book contributes significantly to the considerations of the imaginative possibilities of these water stories, showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis.

Edizioni ETS - Pisa, pp. 160, 2019

La monografia è dedicata allo studio del macrotesto della scrittrice Jhumpa Lahiri e adotta una l... more La monografia è dedicata allo studio del macrotesto della scrittrice Jhumpa Lahiri e adotta una lente critica che mette insieme gli studi postcoloniali, la prospettiva psicoanalitica dei trauma studies e l’approccio spaziale in ambito letterario mutato dalla teoria ecocritica e geocritica. Il testo propone un percorso esplorativo dell’opera di Lahiri in lingua inglese, le raccolte di racconti Interpreter of Maladies (1999) e Unaccustomed Earth (2008) e i romanzi The Namesake (2003) e The Lowland (2013), servendosi di un’ampia gamma di strumenti analitici che enfatizzano la dicotomia tra vulnerabilità e resilienza, un’oscillazione dialettica che anima l’estetica letteraria della scrittrice indo-americana. In particolare, lo studio intende illuminare la natura paradossale del rapporto tra malinconia, nostalgia e scrittura: attestandosi come strumento di testimonianza degli eventi traumatici che forgiano le vite degli immigrati, la narrazione assurge a mezzo epistemologico tramite cui la scrittura è in grado di aprirsi a possibilità metamorfiche in grado di favorire il mutamento e la definizione del sé. L’analisi delinea, inoltre, il nuovo percorso creativo in italiano di Lahiri, attraverso un breve excursus sui testi non-narrativi In altre parole (2015) e Il vestito dei libri (2017) e sul romanzo Dove mi trovo (2018), illustrando come la scrittura sia in grado di aprirsi verso possibilità metamorfiche che generano cambiamento.

Articles by Angelo Monaco

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature, 2024

In If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi (2018), the Indian American author and screenwriter Neel Patel cha... more In If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi (2018), the Indian American author and screenwriter Neel Patel charts the tensions and conflicts of Indian American citizens, mainly from a queer perspective. Patel’s eleven short stories explore human relationships and emotions, with a special focus on such themes as love, friendship, family ties, sexuality and betrayal. The protagonists of the stories are diasporic subjects who recall the myth of the model minority as they struggle to piece their lives together, while striving to achieve professional success by assimilating into mainstream American culture. Starting from these premises, this essay looks at Patel’s stories as narratives where anger, dissatisfaction, melancholia, disorientation, and grief prevail. First, it shows how emotions, understood as “structures of feeling,” shape the South Asian diasporic imaginary. Then, it explores the ways diasporic subjects are immersed in a condition of racial melancholia that characterises the narrative of the model minority. Finally, it discusses how queer grief intensifies this sense of loss, thus laying emphasis on the pedagogic function of negative emotions.

Routledge, 2024

Sarah Moss’s penultimate novel, Summerwater (2020), tackles essentially phenomenological question... more Sarah Moss’s penultimate novel, Summerwater (2020), tackles essentially phenomenological questions concerning subjectivity, embodiedness, and perception. The novel unfolds on a single rainy August day in the Trossachs. From dusk to sunset, the reader follows various British families on holiday in a cabin park while heavy and ceaseless rain pours down and an East European family keeps everyone awake by throwing a wild party at night. In such a restricted milieu, we are given access to the minds of the characters while family tensions and frustrations lurk beneath the surface of everyday life. Interleaved between each of the character’s interior monologues, are lyrical meditations on the wildlife around the holiday park. Thus, by means of narrative fragmentation, free associations, shifting focalisation, attentiveness to the invisibility and inaudibility of the non-human, Summerwater exhibits a fractured narrative form that resonates with the literary imagination of the Anthropocene. In this chapter, I will address the entanglement of human and non-human, audibility and inaudibility, vibrant materiality and social invisibility, self and community, by analysing the ways Moss directs the reader’s attention to the reciprocal interdependence of the human body and the material environment. I will first discuss the polyphonic format of the novel, shedding light on the ways the narrative mobilises the characters’ and the readers’ distribution of attention. Then, I will examine how the novel thematises such vulnerable manifestations as social invisibility and loss of community. And finally, I will contend that such poetic choices favour a certain fascination with an ecology of attention, in the sense put forward by Yves Citton.

Lingue e Linguaggi, 2023

Tutti i contributi pubblicati in Lingue e Linguaggi sono stati sottoposti a double-blind peer-rev... more Tutti i contributi pubblicati in Lingue e Linguaggi sono stati sottoposti a double-blind peer-review.

Textual Practice, Nov 13, 2023

With Stillicide (2019), Cynan Jones moves away from the rural world of his previous novels to tac... more With Stillicide (2019), Cynan Jones moves away from the rural world of his previous novels to tackle the interaction between the human and the nonhuman in an unnamed city affected by climate change and riven by social unrest. The novel pivots around a severe drought that has exacerbated the inhabitants of the city as a way to concentrate on the sensory experience offered by the interface of human and nonhuman, especially celebrating the primacy of auditory perceptions. To this end, I will first focus on the overarching polyphonic organisation of the narrative and, second, on the formal strategies that specifically contribute to the disclosure of what we might call ‘sonic texture’. On the one hand, the multiplicity of voices, shifting focalisation, the erosive and transformative power of water, the constant repetitions and the interconnection of various temporal layers point to a polyphonic form that blurs the border between human and nonhuman. On the other, by means of such poetic devices as alliteration, reiteration, rhyme, onomatopoeia and prosopopoeia, Stillicide exhibits a lyrical texture where ecological degradation and a collective sense of loss are recorded and thematised.

Critical South Asian Studies, 2023

Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple (2020) centres on the mysterious disappearance of chi... more Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple (2020) centres on the mysterious disappearance of children from the basti of an Indian shantytown, thus immersing the reader into the climate of injustice, grievability and vulnerability of contemporary India. Anappara’s debut novel may be described as a coming-of-age narrative with elements of fantasy and crime fiction. It uses various focal perspectives, relying particularly on the ingenuous gazes and voices of the children from the basti. In my article, I will first explore the formal texture of Anappara’s novel, laying emphasis on its generic hybridity and multi-voiced narrative organization. Then, I will examine how the interface of precarity and resilience is thematised through a focus on the particular topography of the city, emblematic of the issues of grievability and vulnerability of present-day India. I will then conclude by showing how in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line story-telling may be considered as an act of resistance in a world of social injustice.

Routledge, 2023

Ben Smith’s debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industri... more Ben Smith’s debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industrial environment with strong ethical implications. Set in the near future, the novel stages an old man and a boy who work for a mysterious corporation in a wind farm in the North Sea. On the one hand, with its marine setting and ghostly atmosphere, Doggerland manifests an elegiac obsession with loss and mourning. On the other, the narrative overarching organisation presents occasional incursions into a deep geological timescale concerned with the changing nature of Doggerland, the mainland that once connected England to continental Europe. Starting from this premise, my essay illustrates how Smith’s novel ties in with Judith Butler’s categories of “precariousness,” “grievability” and “dispossession.” By focusing on its fragmented and hybrid generic form and on its disarrayed temporal frame, I intend to emphasise how Doggerland not only promotes attentiveness to bare life and bare nature but also favours an ethical encounter with relationality as a potential to move away from the obsession with frailty and grief, thereby expanding on Butler’s conceptualisation of grievability.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022

In contrast to the traditional genre of eco-apocalyptic fiction, Sarah Moss’ debut novel, Cold Ea... more In contrast to the traditional genre of eco-apocalyptic fiction, Sarah Moss’ debut novel, Cold Earth (2009), does not culminate in a collective catastrophe. It instead employs archaeology, environmental apocalypse, viruses and ghosts to disclose the transformative power of the archive. This article surveys the ways through which the archaeological motif, environmental apocalypse, elegiac tones and disarrayed temporality can function as archiving vehicles, preserving past memory and opening up to the future. And yet, in doing this, both landscape and writing melancholically internalize losses, so as to become themselves archives, while eventually edging towards post-melancholic attachments.

Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere. Numero speciale: The Past Present of Bildung: New Perspectives on and of the Bildungsroman, 2021

William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) depicts, in contemporary Bildungsroman fashion, t... more William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) depicts, in contemporary Bildungsroman fashion, the life and quest for self-identity of the eponymous heroine. The novel is set in Trevor’s native Ireland, specifically in Lahardane, a mansion along the coast of County Cork. Irish history impacts adversely on Lucy’s story, as readers follow the heroine from her childhood years during the Troubles in the 1920s to World War II and Ireland’s economic miracle at the dawn of the third millennium. The only child of a Protestant family, Lucy refuses to leave Lahardane in the aftermath of a failed arson attack by three local Catholics, thus resigning herself to a sort of self-imposed exile from the world. In Lahardane, which becomes a healing and contemplative place, the heroine devotes herself to reading Victorian novels, keeping bees and gardening, thereby espousing her wounds which however turn out to be “paradoxically productive” (Butler 2003). As usual in Trevor’s fiction, The Story of Lucy Gault can then be read as a trauma story where individual and collective grief experiences are intertwined. Moving from these claims, my paper addresses Lucy’s painful coming-of-age as trauma and self-begetting fiction. I will first argue that Trevor exploits the conventions of the Bildungsroman to illuminate the mystery of human mind, juxtaposing realism with other non-realist genres such as the gothic and the elegiac. Then, I will discuss the influence that trauma exercises on Lucy’ painful growth. Finally, I will examine how the wounded heroine’s exile from the world can be read as a deliberate declaration of autonomy, thereby lending a self-begetting quality to the novel since the heroine is both the object and the producer of the narrative.

Ecozon@, 2021

From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human h... more From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human has played a prominent role in Cynan Jones' fiction. Of Jones' texts, The Long Dry and The Dig (2014) specifically engage with cultivation, farming, and raising livestock in a Welsh rustic setting. Both novels present a rural world that resists idealised forms of representing nature as some kind of idyll, thus calling into question the separation between human and non-human. Starting from this premise, my working hypothesis is that the relationship between human and non-human constitutes a relevant trope in Jones' fiction since they are both caught in the very same moment of crisis, change and transformation. To this end, I would like to read The Long Dry and The Dig through Timothy Morton's idea of the mesh that connects human to non-human. Firstly, I will discuss the generic features of the novels, such as shifting focalisation and temporal disorientation which can be said to favour an encounter between storytelling and material reality. Secondly, I will address Jones' interest in the erosion of the border between human and non-human, illustrating the affective bonds and sensory ties that connect both dimensions. Taken together, Jones' novels entail a deep eco-georgic stance in that rural life is recast in terms of a thematic and material space that brings together human and non-human, conflating change and crisis, failure and success.

Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal , 2019

This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness an... more This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and it contends that Roy's fusion of anti-global activism, typical of her non-fiction writings, and literary imagination, reminiscent of Indian epic texts, can provide an interesting instance of a transmodern intellectual perspective. In particular, by examining gender troubles, ethnic conflicts and vulnerable ecology, my article argues that Roy's second novel refracts the decolonial/postcolonial debate by means of a hybrid narrative form. This interplay between creative writing and intellectual activism can be said to chime with transmodern ethics in that it promotes attentiveness to the perspective of the most marginalised.

$Research paper thumbnail of "Refracting Post-9/11 Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam's Postcolonial Fiction." Postcolonial Text 16:2 (2021): 1-19.$

Postcolonial Text, 2021

Nadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring vari... more Nadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring various manifestations of trauma and vulnerability in the wake of 9/11. In The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Golden Legend (2017), the British Pakistani author combines vulnerability with empathy to build up postcolonial narratives where the state of contemporary global terror is juxtaposed to empathic responses in intricate plotlines where Islamic culture and Islamophobia overlap. Thus, Aslam novels analysed here can be read as studies in vulnerability and empathy, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, my essay will focus on such formal features as shifting focalisation, narrative gaps, and disjointed temporal structure, to show how empathic connections can be aroused. By embracing wounds and loss, the novel therefore favours an ethical model predicated on a practice of a dialogic structure between self and other.

Textus 33.3, 2020

My article analyses Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat (2013) as an exemplificative case study of the B... more My article analyses Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat (2013) as an
exemplificative case study of the Bangladeshi postmillennial literary scene. I contend that, whereas Bangladeshi literature has seen the emergence of prominent diasporic voices by opening to the market of the English language, Imam can be said to draw on a traditional realistic style as his debut novel chronicles a tragic moment in Bangladeshi post-Independence history. In this regard, my essay takes it as a working hypothesis that Imam’s narrative conveys a critical revision of postcolonial Bangladesh and it does so by intertwining realism and dystopia. On the one hand, the novel privileges a dystopian aesthetic that engages with the catastrophes of the present, thus echoing the colonial past and foreshadowing an unpromising future. On the other hand, The Black Coat resists the hallucinatory effects of dystopia owing to the realist mode the narrative hinges around. My essay aims to show how nationalism still represents a trend in contemporary Anglophone literature and how, in certain respects, Imam’s novel denounces fundamental contradictions that are still current in Bangladesh
in the age of globalisation.

de genere, 2020

My paper offers a reading of David Leavitt’s novel The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), and of its... more My paper offers a reading of David Leavitt’s novel The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), and of its cinematic version directed by Nigel Finch (1991), aimed at illustrating the paralysing sense of loss that pervades the American cultural climate in the 1980s. Leavitt’s coming(out)-of-age tale juxtaposes the precarious condition of male homosexuality, threatened by the spectre of the AIDS epidemic, with the disruption of the Benjamins’ family unity, thereby exhibiting the debilitating effects of queer melancholia. By investigating the incorporative mechanisms of queer melancholia and its unspeakable sense of loss, my article addresses the paradoxical search for language as a means to externalise melancholic grief. As suggested in these lines, The Lost Language of Cranes is then concerned with the search for self-definition and in many ways evinces a poetics of melancholia by privileging a tendency to narcissism and elegiac lamentation. And yet, both the novel and the film emphasise the significance of pop culture, gay clubbing, and increasing commodification by means of intertextual references to cinema, TV, and music icons that offer a snapshot of a generation lost in “its new alphabets of images” (Leavitt 1985). In its reliance on grief and pop culture, The Lost Language of Cranes can be said to give voice to what is essentially inarticulable, thus questioning the disturbing mechanisms of melancholia.

Le Simplegadi, 2020

This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palim... more This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palimpsestic memory’, contending that the novel articulates an interconnectedness between memory and migration. Firstly, I will investigate how the tension between aeonic temporality and some paratextual elements that attempt to install order and direct the reader’s orientation mimic and resonate with the intricate motif of the palimpsest. Then, I will illustrate how the alternation between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narration and the format of the multigenerational novel contribute to create a palimpsestic tale
where several generations and different stories are inextricably intertwined, generating a spiral pattern where the multiple and invisible trajectories of temporality are refracted and eventually converge.

Enthymema, 2020

This essay engages with the relationship between ethics and literature. To this end, it addresses... more This essay engages with the relationship between ethics and literature. To this end, it addresses the theoretical framework of narrative empathy as illustrative of the supposed ethical power of literary writing. Using a corpus of William Trevor's fiction as case studies, Reading Turgenev (1991) and Love and Summer (2009), the essay suggests that Trevor' use of metafictional devices (metalepses and the disnarrated), temporal disarray and multifocal perspectives tends to complicate the general assumption of empathy as necessarily easy and spontaneous. These formal strategies of literary representation manifest the underlying manipulative nature of narrative empathy, confronting readers with the ethical effects of empathy. In so doing, Trevor's fiction edges towards the aesthetics of vulnerability in that it entails an ethics of reading and writing that reminds the reader of the darkest sides of human existence.

Ledizioni, Milano, 2020

L’articolo propone un confronto tra The Return of the Native (1878) di Thomas Hardy e The Lowland... more L’articolo propone un confronto tra The Return of the Native (1878) di Thomas Hardy e The Lowland (2013) di Jhumpa Lahiri. Nonostante gli autori siano distanti per contesto storico e vicende biografiche, l’analisi intende esplorare il significato profondo dello spazio liminale che in entrambi i romanzi sembra stagliarsi al di sopra dei personaggi. Il confronto tra Egdon Heath, la brughiera del Wessex in cui lo scrittore tardo-vittoriano ambienta la vicenda, e la spianata (lowland) della periferia di Calcutta, attorno alla quale gli eventi del romanzo di Lahiri si intrecciano, testimonia il significato dello spazio liminale come metafora di sconfinamento di confini locali e transnazionali. Luoghi ambivalenti, attraversati da immagini di vita e morte, la brughiera e la spianata sono come caratterizzati da un linguaggio naturale (landguage), che non tutti i personaggi sembrano comprendere. La brughiera si configura come spazio in movimento, capace di regolare il tempo cronologico che procede dalle tracce profonde della geologia ai segni che la civiltà celtica ha lasciato in eredità agli abitanti locali. Egdon Heath, pertanto, con la sua vegetazione dalle tinte scure e la sua vastità, comprende una temporalità ampia. Alternando superstizione e magia pagana in uno scenario sublime, dove l’immagine dell’uccello migratore rimanda ai paesaggi freddi del Nord, Hardy sovverte l’ideale idillico del tropo pastorale, raffigurando la brughiera come un luogo di alienazione e distruzione del sé. Il paesaggio, però, sembra sottrarsi alle novità che l’imperialismo e il capitalismo avevano introdotto in Inghilterra alla fine del XIX secolo, attestandosi come territorio di passaggio che rifiuta le contaminazioni e rende il ritorno a casa traumatico. Se in The Return of the Native l’attraversamento dei confini suggerisce ansia nei confronti del nuovo, Lahiri, che ha tratto ispirazione dal romanziere vittoriano per l’elaborazione del paesaggio naturale, costruisce uno spazio liminale altrettanto ambiguo e problematico che, tuttavia, lascia intravedere possibilità di connessioni extraterritoriali. L’acquitrino melmoso del Bengala, residuo delle bonifiche che gli inglesi condussero nel XVIII secolo, è uno spazio liminale in cui aridità e umidità, evaporazione e pioggia si alternano in modo incessante. Un palinsesto in cui sono incorporati traumi collettivi, come la Partition, e ferite personali, la lowland è un cronotopo di natura eonica che conferisce temporalità allo spazio e spazialità al tempo. Lahiri arricchisce il già stratificato suolo indiano attraverso connessioni rizomatiche con le dune paludose del Rhode Island, lungo la costa nord-orientale dell’Atlantico, dove la seconda parte di The Lowland è ambientata. Il romanzo, in conclusione, riprende da Hardy il tema del ritorno a casa, facendo emergere il valore rigenerativo dell’immaginazione topopoetica, in linea con gli studi sulla nomadologia di Deleuze e Guattari e la poétique de la relation di Glissant. Intersecando la fragilità dell’ambiente con la sofferenza umana, Lahiri dipinge spazi liminali in grado di illuminare non solo il senso di perdita, ma anche il desiderio di contatto e ibridazione.

Routledge, 2020

My essay investigates the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, ... more My essay investigates the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, Satin Island (2015), which features U., a corporate anthropologist working on the questions of contemporaneity. In particular, I examine how the tangled web of data proliferation and the saturation of ideas affect U.’s ontological status, revealing a crisis of agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Then, by drawing on the theoretical framework of the novel of ideas, I analyse how the novel engages with the metafictional paradox of “finding shape,” showing that U.’s anthropological inquiries inhabit a buffer-zone, a temporal frame that interweaves stasis and acceleration, past and future. I finally argue that McCarthy’s linguistic and formal solutions situate Satin Island at the crossroads of transmodernity: while stretching the fictional representation to the limit, the narrative succumbs neither to detailed observation nor centrifugal alienation. By invoking a problematic relation between human and post-human, through a transmodern critique of our present age, the novel thus hints at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity.

Routledge, 2024

Edizioni ETS - Pisa, pp. 160, 2019

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature, 2024

Routledge, 2024

Lingue e Linguaggi, 2023

Textual Practice, Nov 13, 2023

Critical South Asian Studies, 2023

Routledge, 2023

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022

Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere. Numero speciale: The Past Present of Bildung: New Perspectives on and of the Bildungsroman, 2021

Ecozon@, 2021

Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal , 2019

$Research paper thumbnail of "Refracting Post-9/11 Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam's Postcolonial Fiction." Postcolonial Text 16:2 (2021): 1-19.$

Postcolonial Text, 2021

Textus 33.3, 2020

de genere, 2020

Le Simplegadi, 2020

Enthymema, 2020

Ledizioni, Milano, 2020

Routledge, 2020

Le Simplegadi 17.19, 2019

In his latest novel Clade (2015), Australian author James Bradley portrays apocalyptic scenarios ... more In his latest novel Clade (2015), Australian author James Bradley portrays apocalyptic scenarios in the aftermath of the ubiquitous climate change that is affecting our planet, while following the human conflicts of three generations of the Leith family. And yet, this article argues that the novel privileges an optative mood instead of the traditional collective catastrophe of canonical eco-fiction. To do so, the article scrutinises some formal strategies of narrative empathy, such as character identification and multiple focalisation, which favour the reader's emotional engagement. In the novel, vulnerable manifestations disclose a profound empathic orientation, addressing an ethics of care that implicates the reader affectively. Nel suo romanzo più recente, Clade (2015), lo scrittore australiano James Bra-dley segue i percorsi conflittuali di tre generazioni della famiglia Leith, ritra-endo scenari apocalittici sulla scia del cambiamento climatico che sta condi-zionando profondamente il nostro pianeta. Ciò nonostante, questo articolo sostiene che il romanzo tende a privilegiare una modalità ottativa invece della catastrofe di massa tipica dell'eco-narrativa canonica. A tale fine, si analizza-no alcune strategie formali di empatia narrativa, come l'identificazione con i personaggi e la focalizzazione multipla, che favoriscono la partecipazione emotiva del lettore. Le manifestazioni della vulnerabilità che Clade traccia ri-velano profonde implicazioni empatiche, richiamando un'etica della cura che coinvolge il lettore sul piano affettivo.

Textus: English Studies in Italy 32.2, 2019

Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most prominent contemporary authors of Indian origin writing in Engli... more Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most prominent contemporary authors of Indian origin writing in English. Her short stories and novels raise many important issues, such as the quest for self, the investigation of diasporic identities, the exploration of the everyday tensions and cultural conflicts of Bengali expatriates to the United States. Writing in the interstices of borders between languages, because of her multifaceted Bengali-American background, Lahiri's recent linguistic migration to the Italian language brings to the fore the link between language and self through literature. This article surveys the main manifestations of writing as self-quest in Lahiri's Italian production. To do so, it addresses the category of "self-begetting fiction" (Kellman 1976; 1980) as instrumental in foregrounding a shift towards a more abstract and yet autobiographic style. On the one hand, I argue that Lahiri's Italian writing assumes the shape of a "fragile shelter", despite her exposure to linguistic limitations. On the other, I argue that these limitations are still envisaged as a reparative strategy, evocative of Ricoeur's narrative identity. In Lahiri's hands, the fiction of self-begetting becomes one of self-definition and rebirth, a Heideggerian invitation to 'dwelling in language' which eventually prevails over the aesthetics of dislocation.

The myth of the model minority describes Asian Americans as an ethnic group that strives to achie... more The myth of the model minority describes Asian Americans as an ethnic group that strives to achieve professional success by assimilating into mainstream American culture through strong work ethics. However, this concept masks the persistent emotional struggles within the Asian American community, especially for those diasporic subjects who identify themselves as queer. Whereas the concept of the model minority entails stability, financial success, high educational qualifications and the heteronormative family unit is central to the conservation and reproduction of this model, the intersection of queerness and diaspora probes the distortions of the myth of the model minority. To this end, in my presentation I intend to look at Neel Patel's debut work If You See Me, Don't Say Hi (2018) as a critique to the myth of the model minority, showing how certain subjects fall outside the narrative of this successful model. The short stories by the Indian American author and screenwriter portray conflictual family relations and negative emotions, shedding light on various themes, such as love, friendship, family ties, sexuality and betrayal. The characters are Indian American young women and men, mainly based in Illinois, whose lives are in a constant state of suspension, especially for their queer identity. By exploring the ways these characters are immersed in a condition of racial melancholia and queer grief, my presentation argues that in Patel's stories queerness and diaspora emerge as an alternative form of Asian American subjectivity.

Ben Smith's debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industri... more Ben Smith's debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industrial environment with strong ethical implications. Set in a near future, the novel stages an old man and a boy who work in a wind farm in the North Sea, bound to a contract with a mysterious corporation. And yet, what appears at first sight to be a melancholic lamentation soon veers towards the genre of environmental dystopia. On the one hand, Doggerland, with its marine setting and ghostly atmosphere, manifests an elegiac obsession with loss and mourning. On the other, the narrative overarching organisation presents occasional incursions into a deep geological timescale concerned with the changing nature of Doggerland, the mainland that once connected England to continental Europe. Starting from this premise, my presentation seeks to illustrate how Smith's opera prima ties in with Judith Butler's categories of 'precariousness,' 'grievability' and 'dispossession.' By focusing on its fragmented and precarious narrative form and on its disarrayed temporal frame, I intend to emphasise how Smith's novel not only promotes attentiveness to bare life, but also favours an ethical encounter with eco-precarious manifestations, thereby expanding on Butler's conceptualisation of grievability.

The symposium revolves around the crossings of languages, cultures, genders, and colours, and exp... more The symposium revolves around the crossings of languages, cultures, genders, and colours, and explores how these experiences are articulated in the translational tradition of postcolonial poetry. In this respect, translation, the quintessential metaphor of crossing, is of interest not only to students of foreign languages, literatures, and cultures, but also to those who live, work and interact with people who cross borders in the contemporary era of migration.

The University of Pisa, the Department of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics (Department of E... more The University of Pisa, the Department of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics (Department of Excellence 2023-2027), in collaboration with the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, the University of Louisville, the Italian Association for the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English (AISCLI), the University of Palermo, and the University Library System (SBA), is pleased to announce the upcoming International Symposium, ‘Poetry Across the Lines: Translating Colour, Gender, History’, which will be held in Pisa, Italy, on December 5 and 6, 2023. Organised by Biancamaria Rizzardi,
Fausto Ciompi, Marco Petrelli, Elisa Fortunato, Simona Bertacco, AISCLI, and Alessandra di Maio, this event will bring together university professors, teachers, scholars, editors, and publishers interested in exploring the multifaceted intersections of colour, gender, poetry, history, and translation.

My paper explores depictions of transcorporeal interconnectedness of human and nonhuman bodies in... more My paper explores depictions of transcorporeal interconnectedness of human and nonhuman bodies in two contemporary novels from the global South, namely For the Mercy of Water (2012) by South African writer and journalist Karen Jayes and Archipelago (2012) by Trinidadian-born British writer Monique Roffey. By drawing on the critical insights of posthuman perspectives (Alaimo, Bennett, Neimanis, Plumwood), I intend to show how

Through vivid and evocative language, Moss's fiction often portrays a cold northern landscape in ... more Through vivid and evocative language, Moss's fiction often portrays a cold northern landscape in a vibrant way, so as to let readers plunge into its sounds and smells. Moss' penultimate novel, Summerwater (2020), is set in a Scottish chalet park where British holidaymakers are spending their summertime. The novel explores, in the stream of consciousness style, a single rainy August day while the focalisation shifts between twelve characters and the vibrant materiality of the Scottish Highlands. The sound of unrelenting rain alternates with sudden insights into the visitors' inner lives. Without WI-FI, the vacationers are stuck indoors but alert to the dynamics of the small community around. Thus, a certain voyeuristic mood prevails and one particular family from East Europe draws the holidaymakers' attention. This foreignspeaking presence becomes an element of both social anger and frustration, causing lingering tension within the community. As suggested in these lines, Summerwater can be said to favour an ecology of attention (Citton) understood as a transindividual activity where individual and collective perspectives are inextricably intertwined. My presentation will then show how Moss's novel conceptualises attention as a form of interaction. I will specifically investigate whether the juxtaposition of human and non-human voices creates a relational space that promotes attentiveness to such questions as immigration, Brexit, climate change, social divisions and human fragility. Sliding between suspicion and invisibility, silence and noise, Summerwater privileges attentive consideration to what would pass otherwise unnoticed.

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) may be described as a postmillennial novel concerned with refugee... more Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) may be described as a postmillennial novel concerned with refugee crisis, asylum policy and identity construction. Hamid’s latest novel centres on a young couple leaving their homeland at risk from war and mass displacements: by means of teleportative magical doors, Nadia and Saeed cross spatio-temporal borders, first moving to Mikonos, then to London and finally to California, while migrant crossings and socio-political upheavals materialise around them. The protagonists’ plotline is intercut with brief parallel narratives on other people’s stories around the world, from Palo Alto to Sydney. These vignettes share the same thematic concern with migration policy and social alienation as in its main narrative strand. To this end, the British-Pakistani author resorts to a narrative technique that evokes a sense of instantaneity, reminding us of the simultaneity of time and the interconnectedness among individuals across the planet, where temporal and spatial barriers are porous and permeable. As suggested in these lines, Exit West addresses the instability and complexity of our globalised world, offering a multiplicity of perspectives from different places, social classes and nationalities. In certain respects, this ubiquitous way of envisioning reality seems to be in tune with the main tenets of the transmodern paradigm as theorised by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, among others. Against this background, my presentation will look at Exit West as a transmodern narrative “of(f) the limit”. On the one hand, the novel seeks to transgress the limits of Eurocentricism, giving voice to the world’s excluded and infusing society with individual singularities caught in a web of interdependence. On the other, by conflating social critique, the use of technology and magic realism, Exit West qualifies as a global transmodern novel as it slides between a realistic depiction and a fantasy tale.

My paper analyses how noise and sounds infiltrate Cynan Jones' latest novel, Stillicide (2019). D... more My paper analyses how noise and sounds infiltrate Cynan Jones' latest novel, Stillicide (2019). Designed as a radio drama series aired by BBC Radio 4, Stillicide is divided into twelve short chapters that, despite the shifting focalisation, are intertwined and can be read as a coherent whole. The Welsh author's work is set in an unnamed city in the near future. Here, water is scarce and humans are in the throes of insecurity, social tensions and environmental changes. Whereas the variable narrative perspectives convey the deep sense of loss of the characters, the noise and sounds produced by insects and objects intensify the mental and material soundscape (Schafer 1994) of the novel. This emphasis on noise and sounds provides the starting point for what we can call "sonic texture." By means of such poetic figures as alliteration, reiteration, rhyme, onomatopoeia and prosopopoeia, Stillicide exhibits a lyrical texture where phonological, syntactic and semantic threads are interwoven, contributing to textual cohesion and coherence. In my presentation, I will then explore the sonic texture of some chapters from Stillicide. On the one hand, I will examine how linguistic texture is constructed by means of cohesive and coherent devices, such as anaphoric references, lexical choices and phonological schemes. On the other, I will suggest that sonic texture also works as a hearing vehicle associated with interiority, emotions and ecological concerns, thus making affective encounters a physical presence (Heller 2015).

Stories of natural disaster, environmental catastrophe and human extinction pervade the storytell... more Stories of natural disaster, environmental catastrophe and human extinction pervade the storytelling in the so-called age of the Anthropocene. As literature is sensitive to social and political changes, it is providing proof of this ecological preoccupation with the emergence of a narrative template known as "climate change fiction" (or "cli-fi"). Notably, among the various environmental tropes that characterise cli-fi, water figures prominently. Not only does water hint at the rising sea levels that cause flooding and engulf coastlines; also, the scarcity of such a vital element represents a serious menace in terms of human health and socioeconomic conflicts. In his latest novel, Welsh author Cynan Jones addresses the issue of water shortage in a near-future Britain. With a highly evocative and minimalist prose, Stillicide (2019), originally conceived as a BBC 4 radio drama series, engages with human collapse rather than simply with natural breakdown. Starting from these premises, in my presentation I intend to read Jones' sixth novel as an exemplificative case study on the question of ecological care. I will specifically explore the shifting focalisation and the disarrayed temporality as instances of a vulnerable narrative form where cohesion and fragmentation are inextricably juxtaposed. Then, I will show how some figures, such as onomatopoeia and prosopopoeia, govern Jones' tale, evoking an "ecological uncanny" where the familiar and the alien are intertwined. Finally, I will focus on the enmeshment between self and environment. Jones' reliance on elegy and dystopia is mediated by formal solutions that dissect and tear up the very category of the human, thereby dissolving the border between human and non-human.

https://millenniumschildre.wixsite.com/millenniumschildren/copia-di-keynote

My presentation tries to explore the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy's las... more My presentation tries to explore the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy's last novel, Satin Island (2015), which features U., a corporate anthropologist working on the questions of contemporaneity. In particular, I examine how the tangled web of data proliferation and the saturation of algorithms affect U.'s ontological status, revealing a crisis of agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Then, by drawing on the theoretical framework of the novel of ideas, I analyse how the novel engages with the paradox of articulating the problem of " finding shape, " particularly showing a temporal frame that unites acceleration and stasis. I finally argue that McCarthy's linguistic and formal solutions situate Satin Island at the crossroads of transmodernity: while stretching the fictional representation to the limits, the narrative does not succumb to either detailed observation or to centrifugal alienation. By invoking a transformative relation between humans and technology, the novel thus hints at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity.

My presentation explores the interface of self-translation and translingualism through the examin... more My presentation explores the interface of self-translation and translingualism through the examination of Jhumpa Lahiri’s works in Italian. The main idea of my paper is that if self-translation entails “rewriting” (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990) – a linguistic creative process that enables a text to move between languages and yet remain “original” – Lahiri’ s recent “voluntary exile” in Italian testifies a translingual engagement that complicates her Bengali-American identity. My aim is to illustrate how practices of Lahiri’s Italian non-fiction, in In altre parole (2015) and Il vestito dei libri (2017), offer insights on the question of subjectivity, as well as underlying a fluid movement between languages. While I contend that Lahiri’s translingual imagination, as Kellman (2000) argues, involves a sort of linguistic “matricide,” I also claim that such a condition of loss may be seen as an advantage. My case study beautifully demonstrates this paradox insomuch as the adopted language may become a “fragile shelter,” affording Lahiri creative distance and metamorphic opportunities. I finally suggest that Lahiri’s translingual wandering can be read as a compensative solution in the throes of a problematic construction of a sense of the self.

In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), the geographer David Harvey articulated the concept of ... more In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), the geographer David Harvey articulated the concept of " time-space compression " to designate commodity production and accumulation as key-factors of a renewed relation between time and space. Harvey's condition of postmodernity is hence dominated by an alteration of spatio-temporal perceptions, but whereas globalized modernity has dissolved the borders of the nation-states, allowing for the emergence of global mobility of both human and financial capital, it has also turned hope into disillusionment. As Sankaran Krishna argues (2009), postcolonialism raises doubts about the inequalities and injustices of our contemporary liquid global world. Krishna's contention is that the interactions between West and non-West have not been egalitarian in cultural and economic terms, a dissatisfaction that Joseph Stiglitz had already expressed in his Globalization and its Discontent (2002). Pro-globalization policies, Stiglitz claims, can increase vulnerability and poverty when they enhance corruption, rapid change without cultural adaptation, and ethnic conflicts. The complex interaction of globalization, human mobility and cultural commodification can be acknowledged in the transnational turn of early twenty-first century Indian writing. Like a virus, Indian literature has percolated through Anglophone literary spaces. Not only have Rushdie's heirs, or midnight's grandchildren as they have been labelled, disseminated Indian literature. In their works, as Bill Ashcroft contends (2017), " India itself has put the traditional idea of the nation as imagined community into question ". In the wake of global mobility and spatio-temporal disarray, Indian writing has interrogated the idea of the Nation as it had been embraced in the aftermath of Partition. This year, India is celebrating its seventieth anniversary since independence and contemporary diasporic Indian writers ― Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai and Hari Kunzru, just to name a few ― still draw upon Rushdie's skepticism of nationalism but, disregarding his epic scale tones, they tend to privilege stories of ordinary displaced people. Hari Kunzru's Transmission (2004), for instance, is a tale of worldwide connections and disconnections, global strollers, neoliberal finance and cyberculture clash. A British writer of

I: Drawing upon the convergence of ecocriticism and postcolonialism, my paper proposes an analysi... more I: Drawing upon the convergence of ecocriticism and postcolonialism, my paper proposes an analysis of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) from a green postcolonial perspective. A tale of loss of cultures, identities, relations, and values, the novel is particularly attentive to the themes of decay and fragility of human nature and environment. By staging human brutality and gleaming landscapes of lush vegetation, I argue that The Inheritance of Loss seems to edge towards the aesthetics of green postcolonialism in that it unsettles the colonial tropes of pastoral and georgic dwelling, reassessing the importance of sustainability beyond anthropocentric positions. " The dew formed a lake and their wings a floating stairway spiraling up to heaven. It was here that the first human drowned and ascended to become a god, or according to others, where the first couple – Adam and Eve – were expelled to become real lovers… Once a realm of pilgrimage and veneration, it was forsaken after the neutering of the southwest , the devastation of the lower rainforests by rogue missiles and botched nuclear deterrents. " Romesh Gunesekera, Heaven's Edge Historically, the area around Darjeeling, in the Bengal Himalayan region, had been run by the Gorkhas, an ethnic and linguistic enclave between the territories of Nepal and West Bengal. With the treaty of Sugauli, which signed the end of the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814-1816), these lands were passed to the East Indian Company and Darjeeling was annexed to the British Empire. Nevertheless, boundary disputes continued even after the independence of India in 1947, with shifting borders between India and Nepal, while the population of the area felt betrayed and marginalized. Since the aftermath of Partition, regional separatist parties in Darjeeling district have been fighting for the creation of an Indian state of Gorkhaland which would comprise the region's majority of Indian Nepalis, also known as " Gorkhas " 1. The agitation for Gorkhaland culminated in the creation of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) in 1980, a political militarized group whose main aim was not only the protection of the ethnic and linguistic boundaries of the enclave, but also the preservation of the natural resources of the area, such as tea and timber. During the British colonization, Darjeeling, a hill station where British elites could enjoy the vista over the Himalayan region, was turned into a symbol of what Edward Said calls an " imaginative geography " , a strategy that emphasizes the relevance of cultural diversity and helps to intensify " the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away " (Said 1995: 55). The British constructed the place and the people " as possessing the simplicity and purity of Rousseau's 'noble savage' " (Besky 2014: 49), in line with the basic tenets of such ecocritical concepts as georgic and pastoral. As Greg Garrard observes in Ecocriticism (2012), ecological tropes, including georgic and pastoral, pervade both the concerns of ecocritical theory and the fictional representations in eco-literature. Inspired by Virgil, the georgic takes as its primary focus the interaction between humans and nature, with an interest in the practice of agriculture as a relevant way to articulate the ecology 1 The name Gorkha, or Gurkhas, derives from the troponin of a hill district in the Kingdom of Nepal which was later annexed to British India in the wake of the Anglo-Nepalese wars.

Eco-sustainable Narratives and Environmental Concerns in English Literature/s

Against the backdrop of the debate on the ethic turn in contemporary Anglophone narrative, my pap... more Against the backdrop of the debate on the ethic turn in contemporary Anglophone narrative, my paper intends to reflect on the exilic identity of the eponymous protagonist in William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), the third and last volume of his Big House trilogy. Trevor’s tale, which hinges on secrets and silences, articulates a melancholia of resistance and consolation that illuminates vulnerability as a way of self-definition. Lucy’s self-imposed exile from the world is marked by guilt and abnegation: the lonely child of a Protestant family in danger, she refuses to leave Lahardane. In search of an identity of her own, Lucy becomes increasingly concerned with the preservation of the cultural and historical memory of Lahardane, which grows into a healing and contemplative place tangential to the 1921 Irish Troubles and World War II. Trevor, therefore, views loss as a source of strength rather than weakness and his heroine’s vulnerability engenders consolation rather destruction. Like a modern Saint Cecilia, Lucy endures her wounds behind Lahardane’s walls. The journey towards her self-definition, in conclusion, takes place along a road of vulnerability marked by a Levinasian-inspired ethical care which opens up to the suffering of the “other”, even when the “other” is the very source of loss.

Against the backdrop of the critical debate on 'empire' and 'neurosis' grounded in Freud, Lacan, ... more Against the backdrop of the critical debate on 'empire' and 'neurosis' grounded in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Žižek's theories, my paper investigates Jhumpa Lahiri's novels and short stories which explore individual and collective disruptions in the light of historical and personal traumas.

A recent survey issued by the Pew Research Centre reveals that Asian Americans are “the highest-i... more A recent survey issued by the Pew Research Centre reveals that Asian Americans are “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States” (Pew 2013). They epitomize the neoliberal capitalist success of model minority migrants, embodying the values of economic entrepreneurship and successful mobility triggered by the 1965 Immigration Act. Asian Americans tend to be highly educated (61% of the adults aged 25-64 have at least a bachelor’s degree); they exceed American adults in median annual household income ($66,000 versus $49,800); they have a pervasive belief in the rewards of hard work; and, finally, successful marriages and being good parents play a central role in their lives.
Indian Americans, particularly, have higher shares in education and income with regard to the other Asian American subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese). Furthermore, Indian Americans place a great importance to parenting and they are less likely to see themselves as typical Americans (the Japanese tend to be the more likely). Yet, they say that they can carry on a conversation in proficient English very well. Indian Americans, together with Filipinos, are among the most likely subgroup to define themselves as “model minority”. The term, which was introduced by William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article to describe Japanese Americans, implies that they see themselves as more successful immigrants, even in comparison to Blacks and Hispanics.
Through emulation of white Americans and by drawing on notions of productive citizenship, Asian Americans tend to fill in the gap between their migrant status and the desire to adjust to the American society. They exemplify, through their neoliberal flexibility and high human capital, a model of “reproductive citizenship” that according to Susan Koshy “harnesses heterosexuality to the productivity of knowledge work to enhance national competitiveness in a globalizing economy” (Koshy 2011, 351). The obsession to accumulate economic resources and pass on human capital to second and third generations leaves a gap in the affective and filial dynamics that characterize Asian American families. Sometimes, these migrants fall in the cracks and the deal they pay is more expensive than they think. At what personal cost is such a productive neoliberal model reproduced and who bears its counter effects? Diasporic writers have focused on the tensions and contradictions that arouse from such a strict economic formula. Intergenerational conflicts are particularly strong when 1.5 and second generations tend to disrupt their parents’ expectations such as accruing economic success and neutralizing biases against minority status. The symptoms of psychic disturbance that Susan Koshy has labelled as “filial gothic” (358) convey schisms of family ties and unresolved grief, engendering simultaneously desire to escape and yearning for accommodation.
My paper intends to unveil Jhumpa Lahiri’s deep engagement with how neurotic desire and racial melancholia merge in the second generation migrants that populate her fictional world. In particular, I will explore “A Choice of Accommodation”, a story in Unaccustomed Earth, that will be investigated in dialogue with Mishra’s notion of the “diasporic imagery”, Lacan’s ideas on neurosis, and Eng and Han’s concept of “racial melancholia” as theoretical framework. Considered in this light, through the story of the protagonist Amit Sarkar, Jhumpa Lahiri reveals a multifaceted and controversial identity lying beneath silences, tacit codes and isolation.

Location: University of Essen - Bochum

Event Date: Oct 8, 2015

Organization: Postcolonial Narrations

Conference End Date: Oct 10, 2015

The current phenomenon of globalization, mediated by neoliberal economics, has witnessed the grad... more The current phenomenon of globalization, mediated by neoliberal economics, has witnessed the gradual decline of the nation-state, emphasizing the idea of the world as a single border-space. The circulation and hypermobility of transnational identities allow for the emergence of “migrant landscapes" (Chambers, 1994) where cultures are not self-closed systems, but fluid and composite spaces.
Jhumpa Lahiri is part of the late-modern and capitalist wave of the new Indian diaspora, a mass emigration particularly directed towards developed countries such as the US, Australia, and Canada. The migrant subjects that populate her fictional world belong to the transgressive and transnational category of “global-nomadic citizenship” (Ahmed, 2000). Straddling an Indian-American bicultural boundary, they cast doubts on the notions of home and homelessness over a time span starting in 1965 — when the Hart-Celler Act permitted large-scale South-Asian migration to the US — up to the present-day globalized neoliberal society. Mainly coming from the educated and skilled middle-class Indian background, Lahiri’s fictional citizens are transitional and tangential to the concepts of nation and culture. They adopt a critical stance towards the issue of national membership, because of their in-between dwelling: oscillating among semantic nuances of modern citizenship (diasporic, exilic, flexible), these subjects epitomize an idea of migrancy which questions geopolitical (un)belonging.
Furthermore, place plays a crucial role in Lahiri’s fiction since it discloses the very threshold and interstitial implications her characters psychologically and culturally bear. Being either natural landscapes (the sea, the coastline, the lowland) or urban areas (bridges, stations, suburban neighborhoods), these settings evoke both alienation and assimilation, transition and stagnation, nostalgic loss and deep desire to belong.
In my paper, I will show how Jhumpa Lahiri’s narrative specifically revolves around forms of citizenship that challenge the neoliberal western idea of cosmopolitanism. By exploring her two novels, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), I will focus on the different types of migrant subjectivities which overlap in her narrative: Ashima, Ashoke, and Gogol/Nikhil (in The Namesake), and Subhash, Udayan, and Bela (in The Lowland) embody paradigmatic examples of characters in transit, both physically and mentally, combining restlessness and rootlessness with re-rooting and re-routing. They cross transcontinental borders and, simultaneously, borders can be seen to cross these subjects, splitting their identities and dissolving the barrier between familiar and unfamiliar.
In opposition to the free market, individual enterprise, and the cult of the human capital, Lahiri throws doubts on the allegedly productive and efficient citizenship enhanced by globalization. Her second-generation migrants tend to disrupt their parental expectations, since they experience an intense sense of loss which problematizes their status of hyphenated citizens. Moreover, in inheriting migration, wives share with second generations the heavy burden of “cultural citizenship” (Rosaldo, 1994). Their behaviours and practices broaden the legal dimension of citizenry, on account of the negotiations between public and private/domestic spheres: intergenerational ruptures and gendered disruptions seem then to replace such first-generations’ goals as accruing economic success and neutralizing biases towards minority status.
In depicting the erratic transplantations and conflictual assimilations of her migrant subjects, at the crossroads of ethical dilemmas, Jhumpa Lahiri, in conclusion, shows her grasp of the multifaceted present society from the diasporic viewpoint of a writer without a motherland and a mother-language.

"Il cammino della tolleranza. Tracing the Path of Tolerance. Storia e critica di un concetto poli... more "Il cammino della tolleranza. Tracing the Path of Tolerance. Storia e critica di un concetto politico dall'epoca moderna al dibattito contemporaneo", Convegno Internazionale, Padova, 26-27 Maggio 2015. Programma dettagliato ed ulteriori informazioni al sito: http://tolleranza2015.wordpress.com/

International refereed online journal of modern languages and literatures

This workshop, conceived and organised by a team of PhD Students in Philology, Literature and Lin... more This workshop, conceived and organised by a team of PhD Students in Philology, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Pisa seeks to investigate the meanings and shapes of idiolect phenomena in different genres, such as film, narrative, essay, and poetry according to a wide range of textual approaches including, but not limited to, cross-cultural and translational perspectives. The goal is to explore the many possibilities that the English language offers for creating a distinctive and personal speech style aimed at achieving originality with respect to a standard.

The workshop will be held on Friday 5th December 2014 in the Aula Magna of Palazzo Boilleau (Via Santa Maria 85, Pisa) from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm, with the following contributions:

- Dan McIntyre (University of Huddersfield, UK): Exploring Idiosyncracies in Dramatic Dialogue: A Stylistic Approach
- Debora Ciampi (University of Pisa): Speech Styles in Original and Dubbed Language: the Jargon of Queen Bees
- Martina Sias (University of Pisa): Fighting Oblivion through Poetry: Ofelia Zepeda’s Bilingual Compromise
- Enrico Terrinoni (University for Foreigners, Perugia): Awakening Finnegan. Multilingualism as ‘Plurivocality’ in the Translation of Joyce’s Book of the Dark
- Paolo Bugliani (University of Pisa): Some Perfect Sympathies: Charles Lamb’s Anachronistic Ventriloquism
- Angelo Monaco (University of Pisa): Conveying Exilic Melancholia Through Natural Imagery in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narrative

Routledge eBooks, Nov 18, 2022

La tesi esplora la produzione narrativa in lingua inglese di Jhumpa Lahiri, portando alla luce i ... more La tesi esplora la produzione narrativa in lingua inglese di Jhumpa Lahiri, portando alla luce i nuclei tematici della malinconia e della nostalgia in relazione alla teoria postcoloniale, agli studi sul trauma e all’ecocritica. Partendo dalla distinzione tracciata da Freud tra lutto e malinconia, la tesi coinvolge una riflessione sul potenziale trasformativo della malinconia e della nostalgia. Attraverso un dialogo teorico che mette insieme postcolonialismo, soprattutto i South Asian studies, gli studi sul trauma, la teoria ecocritica e la narrativa, si vuole evidenziare la natura paradossale del rapporto tra la malinconia, la nostalgia e la scrittura di Jhumpa Lahiri: la narrazione è uno strumento essenziale di testimonianza degli eventi traumatici che forgiano le vite degli immigrati, ma può anche essere usata come mezzo con cui elaborare la vulnerabilità, sviluppando una risposta eticamente valida. L’interesse è particolarmente centrato sulle soluzioni stilistiche attraverso cui ...

Pisa University Press, 2017

$Research paper thumbnail of Refracting Postcolonial Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam’s Post-9/11 Fiction$

Postcolonial Text, Jun 15, 2021

This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happines... more This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and it contends that Roy's fusion of anti-global activism, typical of her non-fiction writings, and literary imagination, reminiscent of Indian epic texts, can provide an interesting instance of a transmodern intellectual perspective. In particular, by examining gender troubles, ethnic conflicts and vulnerable ecology, my article argues that Roy's second novel refracts the decolonial/postcolonial debate by means of a hybrid narrative form. This interplay between creative writing and intellectual activism can be said to chime with transmodern ethics in that it promotes attentiveness to the perspective of the most marginalised.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2021

From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human h... more From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human has played a prominent role in Cynan Jones’ fiction. Of Jones’ texts, The Long Dry and The Dig (2014) specifically engage with cultivation, farming, and raising livestock in a Welsh rustic setting. Both novels present a rural world that resists idealised forms of representing nature as some kind of idyll, thus calling into question the separation between human and non-human. Starting from this premise, my working hypothesis is that the relationship between human and non-human constitutes a relevant trope in Jones’ fiction since they are both caught in the very same moment of crisis, change and transformation. To this end, I would like to read The Long Dry and The Dig through Timothy Morton’s idea of the mesh that connects human to non-human. Firstly, I will discuss the generic features of the novels, such as shifting focalisation and temporal disorientation which can be said to favour an ...

Transcending the Postmodern, 2020

This article explores William Trevor’s Big House trilogy that is set against the backdrop of the ... more This article explores William Trevor’s Big House trilogy that is set against the backdrop of the early 20th century Anglo-Irish tensions. By interweaving postcolonial theory and trauma studies, my investigation seeks to unveil the melancholic and anti-melancholic stance in Trevor’s fiction. Through narrative experimentalism, intertextual and intratextual links and symbolism, Trevor subverts the traditional features of the Big House literary tradition, showing that traumatic colonial history can offer a redemption of sort that discloses the transformative power of literary (postcolo-

Le Simplegadi, 2020

This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palim... more This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palimpsestic memory’, contending that the novel articulates an interconnectedness between memory and migration. Firstly, I will investigate how the tension between aeonic temporality and some paratextual elements that attempt to install order and direct the reader’s orientation mimic and resonate with the intricate motif of the palimpsest. Then, I will illustrate how the alternation between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narration and the format of the multigenerational novel contribute to create a palimpsestic tale where several generations and different stories are inextricably intertwined, generating a spiral pattern where the multiple and invisible trajectories of temporality are refracted and eventually converge.

A Poetics of Neurosis, 2018

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021

This paper explores a corpus of Jhumpa Lahiri’s narrative, including The Namesake (2003), Unaccus... more This paper explores a corpus of Jhumpa Lahiri’s narrative, including The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Lowland (2013). Anchored on Barthes’s definition of the notion of idiolect (1967), the essay seeks to read Lahiri’s works through a study of their intratextual and intertextual components in order to show how natural imagery contributes to convey a sense of melancholia. Water, earth, woods, plants, rhizomes, and roots play a pivotal but also an original role since they function as the receptacle of an exilic subjectivity, torn between a lost homeland and the need to adjust to a new habitat. The works chosen, therefore, epitomize the significance of natural motifs in Lahiri’s oeuvre. By entailing the combination between global and local, natural patterns foster a sense of ecocritical awareness of what natural elements may convey and conceal about the relationship between migrancy and places in our globalized society. Key words: Jhumpa Lahiri, nature, place, exile, migrancy

Published in 1999, at the turn of a new century and on the threshold of the third millennium, Jhu... more Published in 1999, at the turn of a new century and on the threshold of the third millennium, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among many other awards) is a collection of stories charting the new Indian diaspora, in the aftermath of the 1965 reformation of the American immigration policy. This paper proposes a textual analysis of Lahiri’s debut work through the lens of diasporic discourse, in order to show how the poised and elegant voice of the Indian-American writer significantly sheds new light on diasporic literature, mediating between ethnic and global issues.