Books by Damiano Benvegnu'
Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean Theories, Practices, Literature and Film, 2024
Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean
Theories, Practices, Literature and Film
by Dami... more Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean
Theories, Practices, Literature and Film
by Damiano Benvegnù (Volume editor) Marta Cariello (Volume editor) Matteo Gilebbi (Volume editor) Graziella Parati (Volume editor)
Whether hidden or exposed, waste demands to be explored and understood vis-à-vis the wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape everyday life.
This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownership and temporalities. It interrogates popular and normative notions of waste and discard and offers insight into forms of ecology built around waste – in particular, with reference to the Italian and, more broadly, the Mediterranean area.
The contributions to the volume analyze questions of submerged/emerging «wasted lives», waste management and mismanagement in urban and suburban areas, and landscape conservation and erasure. Chapters also consider literary depictions of trash and filth as markers of class or otherness and filmic narratives of the wasteocene. The aim is to explore the locality of Italy and the Mediterranean within the wider, planetary system of relations that hinges on production and discard, accumulation, and waste.
The aim of 'Italy and the Ecological Imagination' is to explore non-anthropocentric modes of thi... more The aim of 'Italy and the Ecological Imagination' is to explore non-anthropocentric modes of thinking and interacting with the nonhuman world. The goal is to provide accounts of how Italian historical records have potentially shaped our environmental imagination and how contemporary Italian authors are developing approaches beyond humanism in order to raise questions about the role of humans in a possible (or potentially) post-natural world. Ultimately, the volume will offer a critical map of Italian contributions to our contemporary investigation of the relationships between human and nonhuman habitats and communities. (https://vernonpress.com/book/1293)
Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), by Gianni Celati
A Critical Edition
Edited and trans... more Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), by Gianni Celati
A Critical Edition
Edited and translated by Patrick Barron - Introduction by Patrick Barron - Contributions by Marina Spunta; Monica Seger; Rebecca West; Matteo Gilebbi; Serenella Iovino; Michele Ronchi Stefanati; Damiano Benvegnù; Thomas Harrison; Massimo Rizzante and Franco Arminio
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, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.”
At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River’s Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities.
This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River’s Mouth in the context of Celati’s other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.
Articles by Damiano Benvegnu'
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science
Italian Culture, Volume 40, Issue 1, 2022
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment, 2020
Ecozona 11.1, 2020
http://ecozona.eu/article/view/3660
Humanist Studies & the Digital Age 6:1, 2019
Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for reorgan... more Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for reorganizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his "Dialogues," a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where the Christian God is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions.
Costellazioni 10, 2019
This essay explores presence and functions of natural (i.e. nonhuman) sounds in Leopardi’s work t... more This essay explores presence and functions of natural (i.e. nonhuman) sounds in Leopardi’s work through the frame offered by disciplines such as soundscape ecology, biosemiotics, and environmental philosophy. Given the enormous number of references to the sounds emitted by nature in his whole oeuvre, I will be focusing on those produced by nonhuman animals, particularly by birds.
Although in the Romantic period birds and their songs became in fact metaphors for the poet and poetry respectively, my goal is to display how Leopardi’s avifauna do not correspond to the idealistic powers which his Anglophone counterparts so often attributed to the creative individual. Rather, his references to birds and their singing evoke a poetic vernacular soundscape meant to counterbalance what he sees as the negative effects of the modernization occurring in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century as well as to reveal the ecological power of poetry to help human communities reimagine their relationships with the physical environment.
Ecozon@ 10.2 (2019) [http://www.ecozona.eu/]
Paragraph 42.1, pp. 76-90, 2019
From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think t... more From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.
Mythology and Ecocriticism: A Natural Encounter
This article investigates the relationship between the Italian questione della lingua and Gian Ma... more This article investigates the relationship between the Italian questione della lingua and Gian Mario Villalta’s neodialect poetry. It emphasizes how Villalta’s poetic dialect engages the conflicting linguistic experiences of the poetic subject as well as the socio-historical transformations that have occurred in the reality of his community. This analysis demonstrates how Villalta’s neodialect poetry constructs an original form of dialogical realism, that is to say a poetic strategy capable of incorporating into the text itself the socio-linguistic tensions within and between the subject and his community as exemplary of the tangible persistence of a particular – albeit upended and scarcely recognizable – historical reality.
Ti-Koyo e il suo pescecane [Ti-Coyo and His Shark] is a 1962 film by Italian film director and sc... more Ti-Koyo e il suo pescecane [Ti-Coyo and His Shark] is a 1962 film by Italian film director and screenwriter Folco Quilici. Based on a novel by the Martinican writer Clement Richer entitled Ti-Coyo et son requin (Ti-Coyo and his [White] Shark, 1941) but adapted for cinema by Italo Calvino (who wrote an actual short story on the subject, " Fratello pescecane " [Brother Shark]), Quilici's film features the fraternal relationship between a boy and his beloved pet shark. This article investigates both the making of Ti-Koyo e il suo pescecane and the significance of the human-animal relationship it presents. It thus first explores Richer's novel in order to reveal how Calvino's and Quilici's versions have altered the original narrative as well as its postcolonial and post-pastoral meaning. It then examines how these transformations have affected the portrayal of the friendship between the human protagonist and the shark. The aim of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it argues that these three different versions of same story offer a perfect example of how contrasting representations of a similar environment might deeply affect both the cultural and the material relationships between human and non-human animals. On the other hand, it underlines how all of them also present a representation of an uncanny human-animal friendship capable of reminding us that we can actually love nature and its creatures for what they are.
Carlo Michelstaedter (1987–1910) is mostly known for his tragic suicide and for his undefended te... more Carlo Michelstaedter (1987–1910) is mostly known for his tragic suicide and for his undefended tesi di laurea, titled La persuasione e la rettorica. He has thus been commonly regarded as a marginal, peripheral thinker, and his work has been often placed on the outskirts of the Italian philosophical and literary canon. In this article I focus precisely on Michelstaedter as a minor author, and on his work as an example of minor writing, but in light of what Deleuze and Guattari have called “minor literature,” a concept they first enunciate in their work on Kafka. A comparison between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories and Michelstaedter’s oeuvre does not in fact confirm Michelstaedter’s purportedly marginal position vis à vis canonical Italian culture. Rather, it allows, first, a reassessment of the potential of the attribute minor that overturns the negative connotations attached to Michelstaedter’s peripherality, and, second, a literary and pragmatic interpretation of his work capable of both preserving its uncanny intensity and underlining its socio-political implications.
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Books by Damiano Benvegnu'
Theories, Practices, Literature and Film
by Damiano Benvegnù (Volume editor) Marta Cariello (Volume editor) Matteo Gilebbi (Volume editor) Graziella Parati (Volume editor)
Whether hidden or exposed, waste demands to be explored and understood vis-à-vis the wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape everyday life.
This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownership and temporalities. It interrogates popular and normative notions of waste and discard and offers insight into forms of ecology built around waste – in particular, with reference to the Italian and, more broadly, the Mediterranean area.
The contributions to the volume analyze questions of submerged/emerging «wasted lives», waste management and mismanagement in urban and suburban areas, and landscape conservation and erasure. Chapters also consider literary depictions of trash and filth as markers of class or otherness and filmic narratives of the wasteocene. The aim is to explore the locality of Italy and the Mediterranean within the wider, planetary system of relations that hinges on production and discard, accumulation, and waste.
A Critical Edition
Edited and translated by Patrick Barron - Introduction by Patrick Barron - Contributions by Marina Spunta; Monica Seger; Rebecca West; Matteo Gilebbi; Serenella Iovino; Michele Ronchi Stefanati; Damiano Benvegnù; Thomas Harrison; Massimo Rizzante and Franco Arminio
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, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.”
At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River’s Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities.
This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River’s Mouth in the context of Celati’s other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.
Articles by Damiano Benvegnu'
Although in the Romantic period birds and their songs became in fact metaphors for the poet and poetry respectively, my goal is to display how Leopardi’s avifauna do not correspond to the idealistic powers which his Anglophone counterparts so often attributed to the creative individual. Rather, his references to birds and their singing evoke a poetic vernacular soundscape meant to counterbalance what he sees as the negative effects of the modernization occurring in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century as well as to reveal the ecological power of poetry to help human communities reimagine their relationships with the physical environment.
Theories, Practices, Literature and Film
by Damiano Benvegnù (Volume editor) Marta Cariello (Volume editor) Matteo Gilebbi (Volume editor) Graziella Parati (Volume editor)
Whether hidden or exposed, waste demands to be explored and understood vis-à-vis the wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape everyday life.
This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownership and temporalities. It interrogates popular and normative notions of waste and discard and offers insight into forms of ecology built around waste – in particular, with reference to the Italian and, more broadly, the Mediterranean area.
The contributions to the volume analyze questions of submerged/emerging «wasted lives», waste management and mismanagement in urban and suburban areas, and landscape conservation and erasure. Chapters also consider literary depictions of trash and filth as markers of class or otherness and filmic narratives of the wasteocene. The aim is to explore the locality of Italy and the Mediterranean within the wider, planetary system of relations that hinges on production and discard, accumulation, and waste.
A Critical Edition
Edited and translated by Patrick Barron - Introduction by Patrick Barron - Contributions by Marina Spunta; Monica Seger; Rebecca West; Matteo Gilebbi; Serenella Iovino; Michele Ronchi Stefanati; Damiano Benvegnù; Thomas Harrison; Massimo Rizzante and Franco Arminio
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, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.”
At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River’s Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities.
This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River’s Mouth in the context of Celati’s other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.
Although in the Romantic period birds and their songs became in fact metaphors for the poet and poetry respectively, my goal is to display how Leopardi’s avifauna do not correspond to the idealistic powers which his Anglophone counterparts so often attributed to the creative individual. Rather, his references to birds and their singing evoke a poetic vernacular soundscape meant to counterbalance what he sees as the negative effects of the modernization occurring in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century as well as to reveal the ecological power of poetry to help human communities reimagine their relationships with the physical environment.
totale dei semantemi un tempo espressi, con una furia che trasforma quello che era allora un idillio in un rapporto fatto di desolazione e di irriconoscibilità.
Vengono dunque sondate le modalità simboliche e semantiche
di questa riscrittura, mettendo in luce come essa riesca a far gettare al poeta la propria maschera di Narciso, ma lo introduca in un panorama mortifero. Il quale, paradossalmente, mostra ancora una volta l’impegno dialettico della poesia pasoliniana ad uscire fuori di se stessa, per tentare di pronunciare la Peraula che manca.
The Dialogues Bioregional Project. Landscape Ecology in Central Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present.
Description:
The Dialogues Project is an interdisciplinary and multimedia interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote undergraduate research and learning in partnership with professional scholars. Shaped around the Dialogues of Pope Gregory I (c. 600 AD), a series of early medieval miracle stories featuring the Italian landscape, flora, and fauna, this project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local communities. This collaborative project would provide a digital platform for dialogues between scientists and humanists (both researchers and students), a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness, and an opportunity for experiential learning.
edited by Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 341 pp., €124.79 (Hardcover), ISBN 978-3-030-47506-2
7, 14, 21, 28 maggio 2021
Iscrizione online (ZOOM): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmtPROKQ843qHqLjWSjMz1nGUYxIfi99NUmxO3AlX4W9pdQg/viewform
Diretta youtube: www.tinyurl.com/levi2021
Informazioni e volantini delle giornate: https://www.italiano.unibe.ch/ricerca/letteratura_italiana/convegni_workshop_conferenze/esemplari_umani_i_personaggi_nellopera_di_primo_levi/index_ita.html
In quei giorni e in quei luoghi, poco dopo il passaggio del fronte, un vento alto spirava sulla faccia della terra: il mondo intorno a noi sembrava ritornato al Caos primigenio, e brulicava di esemplari umani scaleni, difettivi, abnormi; e ciascuno di essi si agitava, in moti ciechi o deliberati, in ricerca affannosa della propria sede, della propria sfera, come poeticamente si narra delle particelle dei quattro elementi nelle cosmogonie degli antichi. (Primo Levi, La tregua, 1963)
Far morire un personaggio è criminale; senza esagerare, non è come uccidere una persona, ma come esperienza in parte coincide. Tracce di questa mia ossessione per i personaggi si trovano in Vizio di forma[…] È difficile definirli in modo filosofico; certamente non sono dei mammiferi, perché si riproducono a modo loro: si ha libertà completa su di loro; tu, autore, ti senti dotato di poteri senza limiti, puoi fare di un personaggio quello ti pare, puoi ammazzarlo, puoi renderlo bellissimo, onnipotente, perverso, puoi farlo soffrire, godere, e questa è stata per me un’esperienza abbastanza nuova, un senso di onnipotenza infantile; è vero, il bambino si costruisce un universo dove può fare quello che vuole, e sotto quest’aspetto scrivere un romanzo è una regressione. (Primo Levi, intervista per «Il Globo», 13 giugno 1982)
Il convegno internazionale "Esemplari umani". I personaggi nell'opera di Primo Levi vuole sollecitare una riflessione critica sui personaggi che popolano l’opera di Primo Levi, sulla loro costruzione, sulla loro configurazione narrativa e linguistica, sul loro statuto ontologico all’interno del mondo possibile dell’universo letterario, sulla relazione e sull’eventuale scarto tra dimensione finzionale e vicenda storica; e ancora, sulla ricorrenza di alcuni personaggi chiave in opere e generi differenti, sui prestiti da altri autori e da altri personaggi, sul dialogo che intrattengono con il lettore. Ciascun intervento proporrà l’analisi e la lettura critica di un personaggio, antropomorfo o zoomorfo, senza distinzione di genere (prosa, poesia, narrativa, saggistica, memorialistica, fantascienza). L'indagine potrà abbracciare uno o più testi dell’opera di Levi, e potrà avere carattere sia sincronico che diacronico, potrà prendere in esame le relazioni con altri personaggi, principali o secondari, eventuali rapporti duali e appartenenze a gruppi.
Programma
Venerdì 7 maggio 2021, ore 16:00
Dal vero e dal vivo. Persone, figure, ritratti
Ore 16.00: Saluti e introduzione al convegno e alla giornata
Ore 16.20: Domenico Scarpa (Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi),«Me, mi conoscete». La postura di Capaneo e «gli occhi dell’uomo Kraus»
Ore 16.40: Matteo Giancotti (Università di Padova), L’infanzia è morta ad Auschwitz. Ricomposizione del dittico Emilia-Hurbinek
Ore 17.00: Discussione
Ore 17.20: Pausa
Ore 17.35: Roberta Mori (Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi,«Perfino con una punta di spavalderia». Sandro / Sandro Delmastro: storia di un «ambigeno».
Ore 17.55: Giovanna Cordibella (Università di Berna), Il laboratorio della Buna negli specchi della scrittura. Il personaggio di Gerhard Goldbaum
Ore 18.15: Discussione
Venerdì 14 maggio, ore 16:00
L’avventura della finzione. Eroi, nomadi, imposture
Ore 16.00: Saluti e introduzione alla giornata
Ore 16.10: Giovanni Miglianti (Università di Yale),«Eh no: tutto non le posso dire»: l'armatura di Faussone e le pellicole di Levi
Ore 16.30: Angela Siciliano (Università di Pisa), Gedale «esiste nella realtà»: ritratto di un partigiano tra storia e letteratura
Ore 16.50: Discussione
Ore 17.20: Pausa
Ore 17.30: Martina Mengoni (Università di Berna), Funzione Mann versus funzione Conrad nei personaggi di Primo Levi
Ore 17.50: Discussione
Venerdì 21 maggio, ore 16:00
Prime persone. Un altro modo di dire io
Ore 16.00: Saluti e introduzione alla giornata
Ore 16.10: Riccardo Capoferro (Sapienza Università di Roma), L'autore, il testimone e il vecchio marinaio: echi di Coleridge nel personaggio-Levi
Ore 16.30: Anna Baldini (Università per Stranieri di Siena), L’Autore e i Personaggi. Antonio Casella, scrittore ambigeno e falsario
Ore 16.50: Discussione
Ore 17.20: Pausa
Ore 17:30 Robert S. C. Gordon (Università di Cambridge), I nomi vuoti e il sistema dei personaggi in Primo Levi. James Collins
Ore 17:50 Discussione
Venerdì 28 maggio, ore 16:00
Fatti strani. Umani, animali, oggetti
Ore 16.00: Saluti e introduzione alla giornata
Ore 16.10: Damiano Benvegnù (Università di Dartmouth), Innaminka il canguro: funzione etico-epistemologica dei personaggi animali in Primo Levi
Ore 16.30: Michele Maiolani (Università di Cambridge), Wilkins, etnologo stregone
Ore 16.50: Discussione
Ore 17.20: Pausa
Ore 17.30: Keynote speech, Marco Belpoliti (Università di Bergamo), Knall
Ore 18.10 Discussione finale
My paper explores the ornithological imagery of Pasolini’s oeuvre as a whole, paying attention to how his references to birds and their language intertwine his reflections upon the Italian socio-anthropological mutation. In particular my analysis follows the trajectory of the self-representation as a nightingale from his first poetry both in Friulan and in Italian to the last, tragic, experience of La seconda forma de ‘La meglio gioventù,’ through several other references explicitly found, for example, in his film Uccellacci e Uccellini. My aim is to demonstrate how Pasolini’s poetic ornithology mirrors the struggle between progress, development, and authenticity as expressed in his final thoughts on new capitalism, proposing an anti-dialectical poetic model in which the old myth of the self as “rosignòul” is sacrificed in order to preserve the primitive, oral, scene of Casarsa in its extra-historical, circular, truth.
Giacomo Leopardi begins his poetic career very young with a poem, Entro dipinta gabbia, that is already an aggressive answer to the ways previous poets staged the presence of birds in poetry. However, the place where Leopardi’s ornithological interest finds its major expression is the operetta morale “Elogio degli Uccelli,” in which the canonically romantic link between the lyrical subject and his/her voice becomes, through the literary device of the “language” of birds, a way to question the dialectics between modernity and the search for the “original” meaning of each linguistic utterance. My paper explores the relationships between the “Elogio degli Uccelli” and Leopardi’s philosophical thought as a whole, in order to consider how he structured his bird imagery to uniquely express, at the very beginning of the modernization of Italy, the paradoxical interaction between orality and writing – or, to use different terms, between foné and logos – that is very much a fundamental element of his own poetics.
Despite the wide range of literary genres Levi explored, his increasing fame is nonetheless mostly attached to the literary witness of his own imprisonment in a German concentration camp, as exemplified in his first book entitled Se questo è un uomo [If This is a Man, 1947]. His testimony is considered unique because Levi never gave up the particularly objective gaze acquired during his scientific academic training: as he explicitly states, throughout Auschwitz he carried “the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous but new, monstrously new.” This naturalistic attitude did not disappear after the Second World War. Actually, it became an important part of his lesser known literary work, in which the witness makes room for the poet, the science fiction writer, and the journalist.
My paper investigates Primo Levi’s poems, short stories, and newspaper articles in order to underline how his “naturalism” became a manifest attention toward ethological and more largely ecological issues. Particularly, I will focus on Levi’s understanding of the eco-critical interactions between animals (including the human animal) and the environment, as exemplified in poems like “I gabbiani di Settimo” (in Ad ora incerta, 1984) and short stories such as “Ottima è l’acqua” (in Vizio di forma, 1971).
My paper investigates the connections between Animal Studies and Italian Studies. Its primarily goal is to reflect upon how both fields can benefit from each other: Animal Studies from the inclusion of a culture which presents a unique geographical and historical complexity; Italian Studies from the incorporation of a question that is becoming one of the most crucial inquiries of the twenty-first century and can be particularly relevant for Italian culture as a whole. Specifically, my paper addresses how the Italian case is fundamental not only for the philosophical and theoretical insights recently proposed by such authors as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Marchesini, but, perhaps even more importantly, for the wide range of different animal imageries expressed by modern Italian writers. A thorough investigation of the presence of animals in the works of authors like Leopardi, Verga, Pirandello, Montale, Landolfi, Volponi, D’Arrigo, or our contemporary Villalta, just to name a few, displays in fact a landscape characterized by several tensions between centrality and peripheral-ness, industrialization and underdevelopment, progress and traditionalism, that is quite distinctive within the European context. These animal imageries, then, offer both a better comprehension of modern Italian culture and original perspectives in order to analyze and re-think, both aesthetically and ethically, the link between (post-) humanism and (post-) modernity.
Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry is filled with birds and their songs. From Lorna in Dietro il paesaggio to Subnarcosi in Pasque and beyond, his reflection about the nature of poetry and language has found the way of being expressed through constant references to a particular “dottrina degli uccelli.” My paper investigates the ornithological imagery of Zanzotto’s poetry, paying particular attention to those moments in which bird songs seems to reactivate that path that goes from a pure inarticulated sound to the meaningful voice of one of the most powerful poets of the twentieth century.
Despite such an ironically disastrous beginning of the relations between humans and animals, Belli’s poetic masterpiece, composed of more than 2,200 sonnets in Romanesque dialect, seems to give voice and language back to the animals, registering a massive presence of non-human beings. His depiction of the Roman plebs is in fact somehow intertwined with an animal imagery able to cover a large spectrum of meanings: from the more realistic description of animal life along the very chaotic human Urbe, through the degrading process of animalization of some of his characters, to, finally, the symbolic and anthropocentric comparison between humans and animals in order to achieve a sometimes cynically comic, sometimes sarcastically tragic, but ultimately better vision of our life and society.
My paper investigates such animal imagery in Belli’s sonnets, paying particular attention to those poems in which the boundaries between humans and animals are at stake. Specifically, my work explores in detail those cases in which human/animal representations seem to follow a subverted logic, as in the case of the sonnet entitled Se more, in which there is a human character who behaves like, supposedly, a beast, while the animal dies like a martyr. I claim that this peculiarly comic upside-down world depicted by Belli, not only is a fundamental part of his overall poetics, but also it is used as a dialogical expressionistic device in order to test, sarcastically, the limits of a specific idea of humanity based on the ideological superiority of reason over the body and its functions.
To achieve these goals, however, Levi has used throughout his whole carrier two different orders of animal representations. On one hand, as it is well known, we have the process of animalization-as-a-degradation that he describes in several passages of his opera, especially when the real nature of his experience in the lager is at stake. What it is less known, on the other hand, is that there are actually many images of animals or even human-animal relationships – especially in his short stories but non exclusively – that do not belong to that regime of negativity, and seem to give us a different, somehow positive, perception of what Giorgio Agamben – particularly in his book about the Remnants of Auschwitz – has called the bare life.
My paper deals with the two faces of this use of animal representations, in order to investigate the dialectical relations that occur between them and to demonstrate how, in Levi’s work, animals and humans are actually tied together in a limitrophy made by the (im)possible expression of suffering.
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In the Twentieth Century, therefore, we can see the flourishing of a new dialect poetry alongside the poetry in standard Italian; a phenomenon that is in inverse relation to the gradual but unrestrainable disappearance of the dialect-speakers. This disappearance is due to different elements, such as, for example, the first mass-education in the history of Italy or the arrival of television. This mutation has also meant an attempt, if not a necessity, of these poets-in-dialect to explain the reasons of their linguistic operation, apparently so anachronistic. An attempt that, in the
last twenty years has taken the way of the so-called “poesia neodialettale”, which is a relatively new phenomenon, since it examines from a post-dialect point-of-view the relations between national identity, local identity and language, just in a historical moment when the tendency should be to merge and recognize in a wider European identity.
My paper would investigate and verify this new poetic and theoretical survey, through both studying the general survey of this new dialect poetry and focusing on one of these new poets: Gian Mario Villalta, born in Visinale di Pordenone in 1959 and writer both in prose and in verse, both in stardard Italian and in Venetian dialect. His production in dialect (and specifically Vose de vose, pubblished in 1995), in fact, gives us a clear survey of the relationships and the contradictions among the Italian national identity, the new challenges that Italy is facing in these days (also in terms of language/languages) and the new dialect poetry in general.
L’opera di Primo Levi presenta un caso straordinariamente ricco e articolato di intertestualità. Lettore curioso, onnivoro, asistematico, Levi esplorò molteplici campi del sapere – letterari, scientifici, storici, ecc. – navigando tra libri e riviste specializzate e di divulgazione, per motivi di ricerca o di puro divertimento, spesso accostandosi alle culture straniere in lingua originale, mosso da una curiosità eclettica e dal desiderio intenso di conoscere e di comprendere. Già scandagliata in parte da Levi stesso nella sua antologia La ricerca delle radici (1981), la biblioteca di Levi rimane comunque tutta da scoprire. Questo volume intende tracciare i lineamenti di una mappa critica degli innesti, intertesti e trapianti che collegano l’opera leviana ai libri altrui, mettendola a confronto con ventuno autori, in una galleria «poliglotta e polivalente» che include classici come Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Baudelaire e Carroll, autori di letteratura moderna come Kafka, Mann e Calvino, e scienziati come Galileo, Darwin, Heisenberg e Lorenz.