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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.
This important volume brings together scientific, cultural,
literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives to offer new
understandings of the critical issues of our ecological present and
new models for the creation of alternative ecological futures. At a
time when the narrative and theoretical threads of the
environmental humanities are more entwined than ever with the
scientific, ethical, and political challenges of the global
ecological crisis, this volume invites us to rethink the
Anthropocene, the posthuman, and the environmental from various
cross-disciplinary viewpoints. The book enriches the environmental
debate with new conceptual tools and revitalizes thematic and
methodological collaborations in the trajectory of ecocriticism and
the environmental humanities. Alliances between the humanities and
the social and natural sciences are vital in addressing and finding
viable solutions to our planetary predicaments. Drawing on
cutting-edge studies in all the major fields of the eco-cultural
debate, the chapters in this book build a creative critical
discourse that explores, challenges and enhances the field of
environmental humanities.
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Material Ecocriticism (Paperback)
Serenella Iovino, Serpil Oppermann; Contributions by David Abram, Joni Adamson, Jane Bennett, …
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R1,009
Discovery Miles 10 090
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
This important volume brings together scientific, cultural,
literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives to offer new
understandings of the critical issues of our ecological present and
new models for the creation of alternative ecological futures. At a
time when the narrative and theoretical threads of the
environmental humanities are more entwined than ever with the
scientific, ethical, and political challenges of the global
ecological crisis, this volume invites us to rethink the
Anthropocene, the posthuman, and the environmental from various
cross-disciplinary viewpoints. The book enriches the environmental
debate with new conceptual tools and revitalizes thematic and
methodological collaborations in the trajectory of ecocriticism and
the environmental humanities. Alliances between the humanities and
the social and natural sciences are vital in addressing and finding
viable solutions to our planetary predicaments. Drawing on
cutting-edge studies in all the major fields of the eco-cultural
debate, the chapters in this book build a creative critical
discourse that explores, challenges and enhances the field of
environmental humanities.
What is Melville beyond the whale? Long celebrated for his stories
of the sea, Melville was also fascinated by the interrelations
between living species and planetary systems, a perspective
informing his work in ways we now term "ecological". By reading
Melville in the context of nineteenth-century science, Tom Nurmi
contends that he may best be understood as a proto-ecologist who
innovatively engages with the entanglement of human and nonhuman
realms. Melville lived during a period in which the process of
scientific specialization was well underway, while the integration
of science and art was concurrently being addressed by American
writers. Steeped in the work of Lyell, Darwin, and other scientific
pioneers, he composed stories and verse that made the complexity of
geological, botanical, and zoological networks visible to a broad
spectrum of readers, ironically in the most "unscientific" forms of
fiction and poetry. Set against the backdrop of Melville's
literary, philosophical, and scientific influences, Magnificent
Decay focuses on four of his most neglected works - Mardi (1849),
Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and John Marr (1888) - to
demonstrate that, together, literature and science offer collective
insights into the past, present, and future turbulence of the
Anthropocene. Tracing the convergences of ecological and literary
creativity, Melville's lesser-read texts explore the complex
interplay between inanimate matter, life, and human society across
multiple scales and, in so doing, illustrate the value of literary
art for representing ecological relationships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The words 'Anthropocene animals' conjure pictures of dead
albatrosses' bodies filled with plastic fragments, polar bears
adrift on melting ice sheets, solitary elephants in the savannah.
Suspended between the impersonal nature of the Great Extinction and
the singularity of exotic individuals, these creatures appear
remote, disconnected from us. But animals in the Anthropocene are
not simply 'out there.' Threatening and threatened, they populate
cities and countryside, often trapped in industrial farms, zoos,
labs. Among them, there are humans, too. Italo Calvino's Animals
explores Anthropocene animals through the visionary eyes of a
classic modern author. In Calvino's stories, ants, cats, chickens,
rabbits, gorillas, and other critters emerge as complex subjects
and inhabitants of a world under siege. Beside them, another figure
appears in the mirror: that of an anthropos without a capital A,
epitome of subaltern humans with their challenges and inequalities,
a companion species on the difficult path of co-evolution.
What is Melville beyond the whale? Long celebrated for his stories
of the sea, Melville was also fascinated by the interrelations
between living species and planetary systems, a perspective
informing his work in ways we now term "ecological". By reading
Melville in the context of nineteenth-century science, Tom Nurmi
contends that he may best be understood as a proto-ecologist who
innovatively engages with the entanglement of human and nonhuman
realms. Melville lived during a period in which the process of
scientific specialization was well underway, while the integration
of science and art was concurrently being addressed by American
writers. Steeped in the work of Lyell, Darwin, and other scientific
pioneers, he composed stories and verse that made the complexity of
geological, botanical, and zoological networks visible to a broad
spectrum of readers, ironically in the most "unscientific" forms of
fiction and poetry. Set against the backdrop of Melville's
literary, philosophical, and scientific influences, Magnificent
Decay focuses on four of his most neglected works - Mardi (1849),
Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and John Marr (1888) - to
demonstrate that, together, literature and science offer collective
insights into the past, present, and future turbulence of the
Anthropocene. Tracing the convergences of ecological and literary
creativity, Melville's lesser-read texts explore the complex
interplay between inanimate matter, life, and human society across
multiple scales and, in so doing, illustrate the value of literary
art for representing ecological relationships.
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