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Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices
What can Italy teach us about our relationships with the nonhuman world in the current socio-environmental crisis? 'Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices' focuses on how Italian writers, activists, visual artists, and philosophers engage with real and fictional environments and how their engagements reflect, critique, and animate the approach that Italian culture has had toward the physical environment and its ecology since late antiquity. Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the essays collected in this volume explore topics including climate change, environmental justice, animal ethics, and socio-environmental degradation to provide a cog...
Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), by Gianni Celati
Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude.” Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with photographer Luigi Ghirri, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, ...
New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality
This study investigates the richly diverse but integrated semiotic potential of storytelling. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies which have privileged the study of words in storytelling, this unique collection provides a much needed analysis of how narrative operates using combinations of visual, typographic, aural, gestural and haptic resources. Although both multimodal theory and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a single dominant paradigm. Instead, the contributors use literary criticism, linguistics and new media frameworks in a series of critical studies that are directly engaged with a range of multimodal stories. The contributors analyze works that include oral accounts of personal experience, opera, cartoons, print literature and new media forms of storytelling such as experimental digital fiction and fanfiction.
The Politics of Poetics
Through a series of original analyses of poetic works belonging to the Italian canon or purposely posing themselves at the margins of it, this book seeks to highlight poetry as an art form which has the capacity to show the incongruities of society, not just semantically, but especially through the use it makes of signifiers, which allow meaning to come through notwithstanding linear communication. Specifically, this volume identifies and analyzes a line of diverse early modern to contemporar...
Oh, Serafina!
Heir to the FIBA button factory in Lombardy, Augustus is profiting from Italy’s postwar industrial boom. Yet the dreamy young man is far from your stereotypical industrialist. He is less interested in making money than in talking to the birds in the surrounding garden and in making love to a beautiful factory worker named Palmira. But when the money-hungry Palmira schemes to have him institutionalized, Augustus finds a new love among his fellow mental patients: flute-playing flower child Serafina. Can Augustus and Serafina find a way to break free and express their love of each other and of nature in this crazy world? Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s charming 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! was one of the first works of Italian literature to deal with ecological themes while also questioning the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness. This translation includes a foreword from literary scholar Matteo Gilebbi that provides biographical, historical, and philosophical context for appreciating this whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love.
Kafka’s Italian Progeny
This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.
Quiet Avant-Garde
The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist "reconstruction of the universe." However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection. The Quiet Avant-Garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories - vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities - as well as Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotage...
Wandering Women
Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives. Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. The unusual emptiness of the cities that the nomadic female protagonists traverse highlights the absence of, and their wish for, life-sustaining communities. Laura Di Bianco contends that women's urban filmmaking—while articulating a claim for belonging and asserting cinematic and social agency—brings into view landscapes of the Anthropocene, where urban decay and the erasure of nature intersect with human alienation. Though a minor cinema, it is also a powerful movement of resistance against the dominant male narratives about the world we inhabit. Based on interviews with directors, Wandering Women deepens the understanding of contemporary Italian cinema while enriching the field of feminist ecocritical literature.
Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work
Situated at the intersection of animal studies and literary theory, this book explores the remarkable and subtly pervasive web of animal imagery, metaphors, and concepts in the work of the Jewish-Italian writer, chemist, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919-1987). Relatively unexamined by scholars, the complex and extensive animal imagery Levi employed in his literary works offers new insights into the aesthetical and ethical function of testimony, as well as an original perspective on contemporary debates surrounding human-animal relationships and posthumanism. The three main sections that compose the book mirror Levi’s approach to non-human animals and animality: from an unquestionable bio-ethical origin (“Suffering”); through an investigation of the relationships between writing, technology, and animality (“Techne”); to a creative intellectual project in which literary animals both counterbalance the inevitable suffering of all creatures, and suggest a transformative image of interspecific community (“Creation”).
Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex
This book grapples with multispecies violent exploitations embedded in corridors of power within the animal-industrial complex (A-IC). The A-IC is a useful framework for understanding how exploitative human-animal relations are central to capitalist relations and profit accumulation. ‘A-IC-related-violence’ – killing animals for economic gain – has a ripple effect which results in profound consequences for humans as well. This collection of international scholarship explores topics as varied as how A-IC-related-violence is reproduced and sustained through rapidly changing discursive strategies, ideological architecture, and particular cultural forms that elide and legitimize animal c...
