Posthumanism and Environmental Poetics in American Literature

The global climate crisis is perhaps the most pressing issue that is bringing increasing attention (of governments, activists, and intellectuals) to the environment and the relations of the human with the organic and inorganic nonhuman world in the Anthropocene. On the other hand, the recent academic preoccupation for the ways in which subjectivity, its manifestations – agency, creativity, intentionality, etc. – and its terms of engagement with language have been called into question by what can be synthetically called philosophical posthumanism, has inaugurated a productive season of critical engagement with the question of the relation between art and literature and the environment. Beside igniting a steady process of revision of the epistemic premises on which human claims about the environment are made, this critical engagement has also expanded the academic conversation about the impact of environmental concerns on literary aesthetics and, vice versa, about the influence of art and literature on conventional perceptions and definitions of the environment. As a result, a growing body of literary, artistic, and philosophical works, often characterized by a marked interdisciplinary orientation, has brough into the horizon of academic criticism an acute awareness of the interconnections between humans and their environments. It is on the terrain of this interconnection and of the deep revision it entails of our ways of thinking the role of the literary work in relation to, on the one hand, the philosophical and theoretical, and, on the other, the ecological, that we present papers addressing American literature and art’s creative interventions on how we understand the world around us, our place in it, and the place of the literary in it

Trans-Atlantic Stories, Transnational Perspectives, Hemispheric Mutations: American Literature Beyond the Nation.

Critical framing of the question of archival research in literary studies with reference to the recent trend in trans-Atlantic or New-Atlantic Studies. Problems of American literature and the definition of what constitutes a literary archive vis-a-vis the loss of referents that the "Atlantic" as a watery space of loss and transformation stands for. Discussion of what it means today to frame American Literature at supra-national level. Pros and Cons. REview of critical literatur

“'A Pop Song on the Last Day of Earth': Post-humanism and Environmental Poetics in American Literature"

The essay addresses the problem of the relation of literary knowledge to environmental knowledge, exploring the role of literature as an experimental way of generating knowledge that may better accompany our transition toward the deep adaptation ahead in the context of the multiple crisis generated by climate change

Osservare il post-umanesimo: la teoria dei sistemi sociali di Niklas Luhmann

Nel prendere le distanze dall\u2019idealismo e dal razionalismo europeo e nel riconsiderane concetti e terminologia in funzione della descrizione della societ\ue0, Luhmann non si \ue8 limitato a decostruire dall\u2019interno del suo ambito disciplinare l\u2019impianto umanista del sapere sociologico, ma ha prodotto uno strumentario concettuale e una metodologia nella cui esecuzione prende forma un cambio di paradigma indirizzato ai presupposti antropocentrici e umanisti della sociologia e della filosofia europee.Il saggio evidenzia le possibilit\ue0 concettuali che la teoria dei sistemi sociali di Niklas Luhmann apre alla filosofia e alla teoria post-umanista della conoscenza, ricentrando il progetto di una teoria generale dal soggetto alla societ\ue0

Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

Cristina IuliUniversità degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Dipartimento di Studi UmanisticiFiguring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-MemoriesAbstract: This paper considers how neo- or trans- Atlantic studies conceives of the Atlantic and its legacies in relation to the idea of the archive, that is, of a body of works related to traces of a trans-Atlantic American past, to its principle of organization and analysis for literary studies, and to the critical descriptions of American Cultures in the context of a long trans-Atlantic network. It addresses how recent works on critical race studies and decoloniality, on performativity and memory and on comparative circum-Atlantic spectrality frame an original way to address how the literary imagination challenges the historical voids produced by modern Western amnesia. Keywords: trans-Atlantic; archive; critical memory; American literatur

Dal particolare al planetario: Spunti di riflessione a partire da alcuni paradossi della letteratura nordamericana globale contemporanea

Questo intervento propone alcuni spunti di riflessione intorno alla questione della letteratura globale a partire da alcuni paradossi che hanno caratterizzato la letteratura nordamericana e i Transnational American Studies nell’ultimo quindicennio. Chi scrive ritiene che la rilevanza del caso nordamericano nella formulazione di un concetto di letteratura globale sia centrale poiché ha ispirato, sia sul piano narrativo che su quello critico, molti dei discorsi a partire dai quali si è poi sviluppata una discussine che ha interessato vari ambiti di ricerca letteraria

Animated Animals and Metabolic Machines: Affect in Vilém Flusser’s Theory

This essay analyzes Flusser’s playful engagement with the nature/culture divide and its implications for Affect theory and posthumanism. For Flusser, affect is not a pre-processed human feeling, but a composite of moods, emotions, automated habits, and recursively activated reactions that come from outside – the apparatus of communication, conventions and algorithms that encode what counts as truth. Affect partakes of the same process that binds the “artificial” production of “truth” and the “customization” of life according to conventional knowledge. Similarly, the “natural” world dissected in Natural:Mind is subject to determinations by technology, culture, and habit; in fact, nature is produced by culture as part of the apparatus. Flusser’s version of affect theory destroys the fantasy of the human individual and indicates how humans do not exist in essence, but are themselves symptomatic expressions of the modern, programmatic society. Flusser’s twisted humanism invites a reflection on the cognitive and critical possibilities of aesthetics – as a secondary, reflective form of knowledge that provides models to grasp unhabitual and unusual phenomena even if it cannot account for their occurrence. Art in this sense functions like a Trojan horse used to storm the naturalist fortress sheltering humanist humanity

Wanderers on the Way Into the Neighborhood of Being: Katherine Larson’s Poetry of Life-forms

The article discusses Katherine Larson’s first collection of poems, Radial Symmetry (2013), as a work that interrogates the relation between poetics and knowledge of life-forms. First, it provides the background for reading Larson’s poetry in the context of aesthetics as a domain in which literary and philosophical discourse overlap, and then it situates Larson’s work more specifically within philosophical the discourse of “nature” framed, on the one hand, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pluralistic, non-representational view of language in Nature and, on the other, by Martin Heidegger’s reflections on Being, language and beings in “The Question Concerning Technology”. Finally, the essay delivers a close reading of some of Larson’spoems in order to exemplify the difference they make in engaging “nature,” “life,” and “Being” by means of language: whether by taking care of those entities, or by reducing them to “standing reserve.” Larson’s poems provide an apt focus for a wider discussion about the viability of poetry as a meansto approach the morphological diversity of life right at the time of its human-driven sixth mass extinction

A Second Renaissance: Italian Literary Cultures in the USA after World War II

This essay introduces the special issue “Transatlantic Literary Transfers in the Second Italian Renaissance: Italian culture in the US in the Postwar Era,” presenting new knowledge on the collaborative, transnational network that emerged between Italy and the United States in the postwar years and facilitated the circulation of Italian literary products in the US. By considering literary objects as a special class of products that participated to the establishment and consolidation of “Made in Italy,” and by showing how Italian literary cultures functioned as vectors of a “new” Italian modernity, the essay claims that the success of “Made in Italy” was due in no small part to a storytelling strategy that emphasized: 1) the strong friendship between the two nations in the context of the new, globalized world; 2) the mobilization of the trope of the Renaissance in the service of a projected continuity between Italian early and “new” modernity