Serenella Iovino

Serpil Oppermann

Material Ecocriticism

Winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies 2016 Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2016 This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Written by one of Europe's leading critics, Ecocriticism and Italy reads the diverse landscapes of Italy in the cultural imagination. From death in Venice as a literary trope and petrochemical curse, through the volcanoes of Naples to wine, food and environmental violence in Piedmont, Serenella Iovino explores Italy as a text where ecology and imagination meet. Examining cases where justice, society and politics interlace with stories of land and life, pollution and redemption, the book argues that literature, art and criticism are able to transform the unexpressed voices of these suffering worlds into stories of resistance and practices of liberation.

Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation

Ecocriticism and Italy

An international and interdisciplinary team of scholars offer innovative models of thinking about environmentality in the humanities and in Anthropocene discourse in the environmental sciences.

Voices from the Anthropocene

Environmental Humanities

Roberto Marchesini

Eleonora Adorni

Table of Contents: Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories. Editorial, Serenella Iovino, Roberto Marchesini, Eleonora Adorni - Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism. Introduction, Serenella Iovino - From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocriticim, Serpil Oppermann - Threatening Animals?, Heather I. Sullivan - The Posthuman that Could Have Been: Mary Shelley’s Creature, Margarita Carretero González - Gadda’s Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household, Deborah Amberson, Elena Past - Posthuman Spaces of Relation: Literary Responses to the Species Boundary in Primate Literature, Diana Villanueva Romero - Can the Humanities Become Post-human? Interview with Rosi Braidotti, Cosetta Veronese - Recent Approaches in the Posthuman Turn: Braidotti, Herbrechter, and Nayar, Başak Ağın Dönmez - More-than-green Ecologies, Christopher Schliephake - Posthuman Narratives, Italian Style, Emiliano Guaraldo - Deep Breathing Ecocriticism: Stories, Matter, and Spiritual Dimensions, Alessandro Macilenti

Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories: Part I

Relations 4.1 - June 2016

CONTENTS: Dialogo Ergo Sum: from a Reflexive Ontology to a Relational Ontology, R. Marchesini – The Party of the Anthropocene: Post-humanism, Environmentalism and the Post-anthropocentric Paradigm Shift, F. Ferrando – From Anthropocentrism to Post-humanism in the Educational Debate, A. Ferrante e D. Sartori – Senseless Distributions: Posthumanist Antidotes to the Mass Hermit, D. Sisto – The Post-human Sound: an Interview with Michelangelo Frammartino, A. Lanfranchi – Against Animal Rights? A Comment on Contro i diritti degli animali? Proposta per un antispecismo postumanista (Against Animal Right? A Proposal to a Post-human Antispeciesism), by R. Marchesini, A.G. Biuso – Posthuman Glasses for Nomadic Subjectivities: a Comment on Il postumanesimo filosofico e le sue alterità (Philosophical Posthumanism and Its Others), by F. Ferrando, A. Balzano – Reviews: LNRZ, Golem (2014); LNRZ, Astrogamma (2015), V. Gamberi – Alessandro Ferrante, Pedagogia e orizzonte post-umanista (2014), C. Palmieri – Davide Sisto, Narrare la morte. Dal romanticismo al post-umano (2013), C. Rebuffo – Wajdi Mouawad, Anima (2015), D. Zagaria – Her (2013), film directed by Spike Jonze, A. Lanfranchi e G. Ravanelli.

Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories: Part II

Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism - Vol. 4, No. 2 - November 2016

Elena Past

Enrico Cesaretti

Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia’s trafficking, Slow Food’s gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures. At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego

Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies

Italy and the Environmental Humanities

Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.

Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2016 Written by one of Europe's leading critics, Ecocriticism and Italy reads the diverse landscapes of Italy in the cultural imagination. From death in Venice as a literary trope and petrochemical curse, through the volcanoes of Naples to wine, food and environmental violence in Piedmont, Serenella Iovino explores Italy as a text where ecology and imagination meet. Examining cases where justice, society and politics interlace with stories of land and life, pollution and redemption, the book argues that literature, art and criticism are able to transform the unexpressed voices of these suffering worlds into stories of resistance and practices of liberation.

Daniela Fargione

L’idea di ambiente come sistema complesso, percorso da dinamiche in cui nature e culture si mescolano e si ricombinano, ci parla di un mondo inclusivo e poroso, spinto oltre i vecchi dualismi a cui ci ha abituato la tradizione culturale occidentale. È proprio tale complessità – di idee, sostanze, processi – che questo libro intende descrivere con la parola “contaminAzione”: un pensiero costruttivo e creativo, in cui questioni ecologiche e questioni culturali si mescolano in una visione plurale, consapevole del limite, e pronta ad accogliere nuove soluzioni. Partendo dal cibo, i percorsi di “contaminAzione” esplorati nei saggi di questo volume ci avvicinano a questa complessità invitandoci a guardare in due direzioni: da un lato, considerando come le pratiche produttive e le politiche economiche e commerciali interferiscano con la vita degli ecosistemi; dall’altro, comprendendo come le sostanze che entrano in contatto con il nostro essere ci modifichino e determinino nuovi e più vasti equilibri, storici e ambientali. Si tratta, in altre parole, di riflettere su come il mondo entri nei nostri corpi e come i nostri corpi alterino il corpo del mondo. Ne scaturisce una riflessione ampia e corale, in cui l’idea di contaminazione si estende fino a includere altre commistioni: dalle dinamiche ibridative che costituiscono la vita degli organismi nell’ambiente alle analisi in cui i piani linguistici e discorsivi si confondono con pratiche di mistificazione. Ecco dunque tracciate le coordinate di questo libro, in cui autori e autrici, diversi per esperienze e professionalità, dialogano sulle confluenze di cibo, ambiente e testi culturali, contribuendo al dibattito transdisciplinare delle Environmental Humanities.

Serenella Iovino

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