Suchergebnisse

Bodies of Naples: a journey in the landscapes of porosity -- Cognitive justice and the truth of biology: death (and life) in Venice -- Three earthquakes: wounds, signs, and resisting arts in Belice, Irpinia, and L'Aquila -- Slow: Piedmont's stories of landscapes, resistance, and liberation.

Questo saggio apre il cluster «Storie della crisi ecologica», cinque scritti che, partendo dalle prospettive della letteratura, del cinema, della storia am- bientale e dell'attivismo eco-culturale, inquadrano le dinamiche intrecciate di ecologia, società. Seguendo il percorso del discorso ambientale dagli ini- zi negli anni '70 all'affermazione delle environmental humanities, il saggio ri ette sulla struttura complessa della crisi ecologica. La crisi ecologica, si sostiene, non va vista come una crisi "al singolare", limitata alle dinamiche "naturali", ma come un complesso sistema di crisi, in cui s'intrecciano eco- logia, politica, società, nature umane e non umane. L'aspetto prevalente di questa crisi, tuttavia, è quello culturale: sono immagini sociali e stili di vita non sostenibili che spesso determinano squilibri ambientali e forme di ingiu- stizia sociale. L'emergenza delle environmental humanities o scienze umane ambientali è la risposta a questo problema: con nare l'ambiente al solo di- scorso scienti co, infatti, equivale a rinunciare alla responsabilità educativa che le scienze umane hanno di plasmare forme di consapevolezza essenziali alla vita politica. Tra le scienze umane, ci si sofferma sulla funzione della letteratura e dell'ecocritica, viste come momenti di avvicinamento etico e conoscitivo agli intrecci della vita ambientale. Se, come sostengono i teorici della narratologia cognitiva, la letteratura ci dà un'"esperienza vicaria" di re- altà che non fanno parte del nostro quotidiano, le narrative possono non solo ricondurci alle trame del mondo, ma anche contribuire a liberare la natura e gli esseri non umani dal loro silenzio, costituendo uno strumento decisivo di educazione ambientale.

Questo saggio esamina gli effetti del disastro di Seveso attraverso lo sguardo di una grande ambientalista e femminista italiana: Laura Conti. Nel far ciò, mi muovo all'interno di due cornici metodologico-concettuali: il femminismo neo-materialista e postumanista e l'ecocritica. Nel luglio del 1976 una nube di diossina si sprigionò dal reattore B dello stabilimento dell'ICMESA Givaudan di Meda, in provincia di Milano. La nube tossica contaminò un territorio ampio e popoloso, avvelenando persone, animali, terreni. Per le donne, le conseguenze di questo disastro furono ancora più drammatiche: la diossina, infatti, causa malformazioni fetali e mette a rischio la gestazione. Nella provincia brianzola, cattolica e conservatrice, questo elemento scatenò fortissime polemiche sull'autodeterminazione delle donne e sulla loro scelta di interrompere le gravidanze a rischio. Laura Conti, medico, scienziata, attivista ambientale, e in quegli anni consigliere regionale della Lombardia, fu testimone della catastrofe, e la raccontò in due scritti: il reportage Visto da Seveso e il romanzo Una lepre con la faccia di bambina. Analizzando queste opere, e concentrandomi sulla diossina come "agente narrativo postumano", ossia come un "agente rivelatore" in grado di collegare la materialità e le sue riverberazioni discorsive, rifletto sul modo in cui l'ecocritica femminista può fungere da strumento epistemologico per un'etica e una politica di liberazione.

"Where does the posthuman dwell? At what address? And in what type of house?" These questions, borrowed from the opening of Deborah Amberson and Elena Past's essay on "Gadda's Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household," tickle our eco-accustomed ears – ears that more often than not like to take ideas back to their earthly dwelling, something that the Greek all-too famously called oikos. In our case, however, to provide the right answer to these questions is definitely challenging and might require a little "veering." The reason is simple: situated by definition in a mobile space of matter and meanings, the posthuman does not seem so prone to dwell. In fact, it moves, relentlessly shifting the boundaries of being and things, of ontology, epistemology, and even politics. And these boundaries, especially those between human and nonhuman, are not only shifting but also porous: based on the – biological, cultural, structural – combination of agencies flowing from, through, and alongside the human, the posthuman discloses a dimension in which "we" and "they" are caught together in an ontological dance whose choreography follows patterns of irredeemable hybridization and stubborn entanglement. In this mobile and uncertain dwelling, furthermore, the posthuman might not have a stable "address," but it does address important issues: it addresses, for example, the alleged self-sufficiency of the human, the purported subsidiarity of the nonhuman, and the consistency of categorical essences and forms that hover over our visions and practices as if they had been demarcated ab aeterno by the hand of an inflexible taxonomist. Taking a closer look, finally, we can see that the posthuman's house is not only mobile and a bit shambolic, but also operationally open: open to transformations and revolutions, ready to welcome the natures, matters, and cultural agents that determine the existence of the human and accompany it in its biological and historical adventures. It is a collectivehouse for "nomadic" comings and goings, and most of all for belonging-together and multiple becomings: its inhabitant and "name-bearer," the posthuman subject is, in fact, "a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity" – a subject "based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building," as Rosi Braidotti says in her beautiful interview with Cosetta Veronese. In other words, as its house is itinerant and accessible to numerous guests, including the elements, the posthuman subject is a restless and sociable agent, allergic to limitations and boundaries, and ontologically full of stories. A biocultural Picaro, one might say.

"Where does the posthuman dwell? At what address? And in what type of house?" These questions, borrowed from the opening of Deborah Amberson and Elena Past's essay on "Gadda's Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household," tickle our eco-accustomed ears – ears that more often than not like to take ideas back to their earthly dwelling, something that the Greek all-too famously called oikos. In our case, however, to provide the right answer to these questions is definitely challenging and might require a little "veering." The reason is simple: situated by definition in a mobile space of matter and meanings, the posthuman does not seem so prone to dwell. In fact, it moves, relentlessly shifting the boundaries of being and things, of ontology, epistemology, and even politics. And these boundaries, especially those between human and nonhuman, are not only shifting but also porous: based on the – biological, cultural, structural – combination of agencies flowing from, through, and alongside the human, the posthuman discloses a dimension in which "we" and "they" are caught together in an ontological dance whose choreography follows patterns of irredeemable hybridization and stubborn entanglement. In this mobile and uncertain dwelling, furthermore, the posthuman might not have a stable "address," but it does address important issues: it addresses, for example, the alleged self-sufficiency of the human, the purported subsidiarity of the nonhuman, and the consistency of categorical essences and forms that hover over our visions and practices as if they had been demarcated ab aeterno by the hand of an inflexible taxonomist. Taking a closer look, finally, we can see that the posthuman's house is not only mobile and a bit shambolic, but also operationally open: open to transformations and revolutions, ready to welcome the natures, matters, and cultural agents that determine the existence of the human and accompany it in its biological and historical adventures. It is a collectivehouse for "nomadic" comings and goings, and most of all for belonging-together and multiple becomings: its inhabitant and "name-bearer," the posthuman subject is, in fact, "a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity" – a subject "based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building," as Rosi Braidotti says in her beautiful interview with Cosetta Veronese. In other words, as its house is itinerant and accessible to numerous guests, including the elements, the posthuman subject is a restless and sociable agent, allergic to limitations and boundaries, and ontologically full of stories. A biocultural Picaro, one might say.

"Material ecocriticism" is a methodological approach which, assuming the active expressiveness of matter, extends the category of text to all material formations, taking bodies and landscapes as the bearers of "material narratives". Investigating the trope of "death in Venice," my chapter proposes a comparative reading of Mann's famous novella, Andrea Zanzotto's lyrical cycle Fu Marghera, and Marco Paolini's theatrical play Parlamento Chimico/Storie di plastica. Its main point, however, will be an examination of this theme in the city's own textuality and active materiality. Applying the categories of material ecocriticism, in fact, I concentrate on Venice as a text made out of embodied stories—a material text, in which natural dynamics, cultural practices, political visions, and industrial choices are interlaced with human bodies in issues of justice, health, and ecology.

This bibliographic essay illustrates the proliferation of studies about the "new materialisms" and examines the potential influx of this conceptual trend on ecocriticism. In the discussion, in particular, I provide a comparative analysis of four books: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008), Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2010), Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2010), David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

Reseña de Libro: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008), 448pp.; reseña de Libro: Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2010), 448pp. ; Reseña de Libro: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2010), 200pp.; Reseña de Libro: David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 336pp.

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. For "human" I mean here the "pure" human, conceived both as a general category and as an individual: deconstructing the idea of humanity-qua-normality is in fact a further 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-as-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 take this novel as an occasion to reflect on the current trends of ecocriticism and the possible development toward an ecological form of humanism. The essay ends with a foray into literary works that deal with madness and the idea of humanity.

Introduction : the environmental humanities and the challenges of the anthropocene / Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino -- Posthuman environs / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Environmental history between institutionalization and revolution : a short commentary with two sites and one experiment / Marco Armiero -- Cultural ecology, the environmental humanities, and the transdisciplinary knowledge of literature / Hubert Zapf -- Where is feminism in the environmental humanities? / Greta Gaard -- Seasick among the waves of ecocriticism : an inquiry into alternative historiographic metaphors / Scott Slovic -- The extraordinary strata of the anthropocene / Jan Zalasiewicz -- Worldview remediation in the first century of the new millennium / J. Baird Callicott -- We have never been "anthropos" : from environmental justice to cosmopolitics / Joni Adamson -- Resources (un)LTD : of planets, mining and biogeochemical togetherness / Filippo Bertoni -- Lacuna : minding the gaps of place and class / Lowell Duckert -- Nature/culture/seawater : theory machines, anthropology, oceanization / Stefan Helmreich -- Revisiting the anthropological difference / Matthew Calarco -- Lively ethography : storying animist worlds / Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose -- Religion and ecology : towards the communion of creatures / Kate Rigby -- How the earth speaks now : the book of nature and biosemiotics as theoretical resource for the environmental humanities in the twenty-first century / Wendy Wheeler -- How to read a bridge / Rob Nixon -- The Martian book of the dead / Bronislaw Szerszynski -- On rivers / Juan Carlos Galeano -- Can the humanities become posthuman? : a conversation / Rosi Braidotti and Cosetta Veronese

"Ecocriticsim is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, coming together to analyze the environment and determine possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. The discipline was heralded by publication of The Ecocrticism Reader (U Georgia, 1996) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (Harvard, 1995). Recently, all kinds of "texts" have been subjected to ecocritical methods (film, TV, scientific narrative, and architecture as well as nature writing and Romantic poetry) and questions about place (see our Getting Back into Place, 2nd ed., 2009), materialism (agency, process, and relationship), grounding in the natural sciences, and philosophical precision have defined the movement. This edited volume aims to bring ecocriticism closer to the material turn. The essays collected here focus on material entanglements, the agency of things, processes, and making meaning out of matter and things. It is an effective an broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and human expression about the world to which we are intimately connected. Boith Iovino and Opperman are well know as ecocrtical theorists. They have collected essays from many of the stars in the discipline and this volume should set a new benchmark for the field"--

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 cliche 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

Foreword : before nature? /Brooke Holmes --Introduction /Christopher Schliephake--Part I : Environmental (Hi)Stories : Negotiating Human-Nature Interactions --Environmental mosaics natural and imposed /J. Donald Hughes --Poseidon's wrath and the end of Helike : notions about the anthropogenic character of disasters in antiquity /Justine Walter --Glades of dread : the ecology and aesthetics of loca horrida /Aneta Kliszcz and Joanna Komorowska --Response : hailed by the genius of ruins -- antiquity, the anthropocene, and the environmental humanities /Hannes Bergthaller--Part II : Close Readings : Literary Ecologies and the More-Than-Human World --Eroticized environments : ancient Greek natural philosophy and the roots of erotic ecocritical contemplation /Thomas Sharkie and Marguerite Johnson --Interspecies ethics and collaborative survival in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura /Richard Hutchins --The ecological highway : environmental ekphrasis in Statius, Silvae 4.3 /Christopher Chinn --Impervious nature as a path to virtue : Cato in the ninth book of Bellum Civile /Vittoria Prencipe --Response : re-thinking borderlines ecologies -- a literary ethics of exposure /Katharina Donn--Part III : "Green" Genres : The Pastoral and Georgic Tradition --The environmental humanities and the pastoral tradition /Terry Gifford -- "How/to make fields fertile" : ecocritical lessons from the history of Virgil's Georgics in translation /Laura Sayre --Nec provident futuro tempori, sed quasi plane in diem vivant -- sustainable business in Columella's De Re Rustica? /Lars Kessler and Konrad Ott --Response : back to the future -- rethinking time in precarious times /Roman Bartosch --Part IV : Classical Reception : Presence, Absence, and the Afterlives of Ancient Culture --The myth of Rhiannon : an ecofeminist perspective /Anna Banks --Emblems and antiquity : an exploration of speculative emblematics /Lucy Mercer and Laurence Grove --The sustainability of texts : transcultural ecology and classical reception /Christopher Schliephake --Daoist spiritual ecology in the "Anthropocene" /Jingcheng Xu --Response : from ecocritical reception of the ancients to the future of the environmental humanities (with a detour via romanticism) /Kate Rigby --Afterword : revealing roots -- ecocriticism and the cultures of antiquity /Serenella Iovino.