«Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?»: An Ecomodernist Reading of Svevo’s "La Coscienza di Zeno" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Luigi Meneghello. An Ecocritical Approach
De la représentation de la crise à la crise de la représentation, 2020
Cette étude examine la relation entre texte et biosphère dans les oeuvres de Luigi Meneghello (1922-2007), en la situant dans le contexte de sa production littéraire. Partant de cette analyse, la vision écologique de l’auteur se présente sous un triple aspect : le « texte » comme « écosystème », caractérisé par une vision organique du processus d’écriture ; la crise écologique et la pollution, entraînant un développement de l’éthique environnementale ; l’écologie des choses, selon la perspective du Material Ecocriticism. L’essai examine aussi la présence des animaux dans les oeuvres de Meneghello, ce qui soulève la possibilité d’une critique de la vision anthropocentrique.
Ecological Literature in Italy and the Manifesto di Ecopoesia Italiana
Revista Interdisciplinar de Literatura e Ecocrítica, 2020
This paper analyses the national and international historical-literary context that has led to the birth of a certain Italian poetic genre, a genre that is inspired by Ecopoetry and that, thanks to the contributions of past and present poets, helped to the birth of a new ethic in Italian literature. In 2005, Maria Ivana Trevisani and others underlined the characteristics of this poetry in a Manifesto of the Italian Poetry. The present article presents the contents of that Manifesto, concentrating on the new ethic that is its inspiration, and putting forth a simple expressive form that is comprehensible to all cultures (and, therefore, easily translatable) as recommended by the General Conference of UNESCO in a message about the World Day of Poetry(2007).
Humanities
Taking in consideration, alongside Cheryll Glotfelty, that "ecocriticism seeks to evaluate text ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness in the responses to environmental crisis" (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, p. 5), and that crisis refers not only to the ecology of the environment but also to that of social relations and the psyche, as proposed by Félix Guattari (1990), understanding that there is a lack of equilibrium among the three registries that provoke the crisis lived by the contemporary individual, in a broad spectrum, this work intends to understand how the character Marcovaldo, from Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City (1963), articulates modes of being, dwelling and surviving in a great metropolis, through the adoption of postures coherent with what we would call, later, ecosophy. In addition to the two aforementioned theorists, the ideas of Garrard (2006) and Serres (1991) will be used. Also, we intend to show how much the stories in the collection hold great potential for ecocritical reading and, therefore, for a response to the level of awareness about the ecological crisis.
'Introduction: Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism'
The Italianist, 2023
The title of this special issue, Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we move — material ecocriticism — and the direction in which we want to take it — cross-cultural exchanges — starting from an Italian viewpoint. According to this framework, matter is densely storied, yet stories are not the same for all human or nonhuman inhabitants of an ecosystem. The narrative patterns they articulate depend on the embodiment of the entities participating in the encounter, the senses and technological apparatuses engaged in interpreting them, and the cultural, social, and political positionalities of the participants. Conversely, material stories affect those who explore them in complex ways contingent upon the encounter, the body and cultural background of the explorers, and their position within power relations. This introduction and the special issue articles expand scholarship developed at the crossroads of Italian studies and ecocriticism in the last thirty years.
The Road to Cosmic Labyrinths: Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco in Il Menabò, 5
Notes in Italian Studies, 2021
This note focuses on two essays: 'La sfida al labirinto' by Italo Calvino and 'Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realtà' by Umberto Eco (henceforth 'Sfida' and 'Modo', respectively). Both essays were published in the Turin-based literary journal Il menabò in 1962, in the midst of a debate surrounding the connection between industry and literature that had originated in the previous number of the publication. From different angles, and with only partially divergent arguments, both essays discuss literary and cultural responses to Italian industrialization. The first section of this note will compare the two essays and analyse their paratexts. The second part will highlight the subtle, yet pervasive influence of 'Modo' in Eco's later works, before moving to a discussion of the double consonance between, on the one hand, Calvino's discussion of maps in 'Sfida' and Fredric Jameson's idea of cognitive mapping, and on the other hand, between Eco's analysis of creative exhaustion in 'Modo' and John Barth's 'literature of exhaustion'. The note ultimately argues that 'Sfida' and 'Modo' represent not only a key step in their authors' intellectual paths, but also the first stirrings of Italian postmodernism.
"The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizon." Eds. S. Oppermann, U. Ozdag, N. Ozkan, and S. Slovic. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholarly Press, 2011., 2011
In a time when the “palimpsest” of ecocriticism is being constantly enriched, and that a “third wave” (Slovic, Adamson) is largely consolidating, it is more and more compelling to re-address the question about the human. “Human” is here conceived both as a general category and as an individual: deconstructing the idea of humanity-qua-normality is in fact a way to question the oppositions between culture and nature, domesticated and wild, center and periphery. By placing the focus of the dualism not outside, but inside the human being, ecocriticism can contribute to a critical reflection on humanism, in which the category of radical otherness as an attribute of the human plays a pivotal role. Issues such as madness or disability, for example, both radically challenge and provoke the very idea of human, regardless of social contexts, of race, religion or ethnic group. Madness and disability create in fact a "wilderness zone" inside the tamed area of normality, of humanity-qua-normality, of human as a norm and a measure of itself. Placing the question of otherness within the taxonomy of the human subject, madness and disability introduce a radical fracture in this taxonomy, showing that “the other” is not only nature (as the other-than-human), but it can be the human itself. Calvino's short novel The Watcher (a political story set in a hospital for mentally and physically disabled) is interesting in this respect. Questioning human “normality,” it questions in fact the totalizing ideology of historismus and linear progress, introducing an idea that could be labelled a “dark enlightenment,” or, an enlightenment based on the awareness of reason’s “tragic” limits and unpredictability rather than on reason’s glory. I will take this novel as an occasion to reflect on the current trends of ecocriticism and the possible development toward an ecological form of humanism.
Ecological Wisdom and Postmodern Defiance in Italo Calvino's Invisible …
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities has commanded the attention of myriad scholars. This analysis adopts a readerly hermeneutics to the underlying theme and a number of his metaphorical cities in order to explore their deeper ecological tropes that call to us in this new century of ecological scarcity, global warming, and urban decay. By deconstructing and reconstructing fifteen of his invisible cities, it encourages us to interrogate these fictional cities and our existential ones to find the evidence of ecological wisdom and political hope conveyed in some and accept the necessity of political defiance to those ensconced in the inferno of consumerist fantasies, capitalist profligacy, and technological hubris that haunts our postmodern urban world. By turning toward these figures of ecological wisdom and postmodern defiance, we honor Calvino's call to nurture them in the space of appearance and make them the symbolic building blocks of humankind's true abode.
Nature's Creative Balance: On Italian Eco-art
Nature's Creative Balance: On Italian Eco-art, essay by Andrea Lerda, 2017
In "Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies Italy and the Environmental Humanities" - published by University of Virginia Press and edited by Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti and Elena Past - Andrea Lerda analyzes a specific historical period of Italian artistic, literary and cultural history, as a fertile ground for the development of contemporary ecological art researches. Starting from theories and formal solutions proposed by Arte Povera, the author put in dialogue this experience with Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most charismatic and non-conformist figures of the Italian literary scene, who clearly shouts out what is happening in Italy between the Sixties and Seventies. It is in this specific historical period, saturated with energies that aim at the recovery of the primordial relationship between man and nature and the rediscovery of vital energies invisible to our eyes, that we can trace the crucial moment from which, in Italy, many artists have developed an ecological sensitivity which then became the object and subject of their artistic research.