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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.
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").
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").
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