Binding and liberating: recipes for environmental narratives

Crafting narratives alternative to dominant discourses of natural-cultural depletion is one of the signature goals of the ecocritical “test kitchen.” This culinary analogy highlights deeper similarities: both recipes and eco-narratives create symbolic and material connections between people and the environment, which, in turn, enable transformative practices. But how can we craft messages that are generative of positive processes of transformation? Or, to put it differently, what are recipes for eco-narratives? This article proposes a versatile method to test what uses of language and dynamics elicited by texts might produce environmental action. The culinary experiment draws on Italian second-wave feminism, a theoretical “cuisine” that has engaged with language to rework dominant relationships to others and to the world. Feminist strategies, including the practice of “starting from oneself,” the reclaiming of the personal as political, and the retracing of alternative genealogies, have used language as a means simultaneously of liberation and of reconnection with the material, embodied world. This liberating binding is repurposed as a key technique to craft and identify effective eco-narratives. Here, feminist strategies intersect with the chemical and social operations of cooking through discussion of three recipes tied to the author’s Mediterranean origins: a milk pudding, eggless fresh pasta, and a type of ancient-grains bread. Through the processes of binding and softening, common to preparations that employ starch, the analysis demonstrates that a starchy language used both to bind (us to material life) and to soften (power structures) has enormous environmental potential. While primarily serving scholars in Italian studies and ecocriticism, this culinary method invites adaptations across food cultures and gender identities.Confeccionar narrativas alternativas a los discursos dominantes del agotamiento natural-cultural es una de las metas distintivas de la “cocina de prueba” de la ecocrítica. Esta analogía culinaria destaca similitudes más profundas: tanto las recetas como las eco-narrativas crean conexiones simbólicas y materiales entre las personas y el entorno, las cuales, a su vez, permiten posibilitan prácticas transformativas. Sin embargo, ¿cómo podemos confeccionar mensajes que generen procesos de transformación positivos? O, dicho de otro modo, ¿cuáles son las recetas de las eco-narrativas? Este artículo propone un método versátil para comprobar qué usos del lenguaje y dinámicas obtenidas de los textos pueden producir acción medioambiental. El experimento culinario recurre a la segunda ola del feminismo italiano, una “cocina” teórica que ha interactuado con el lenguaje para reconfigurar las relaciones dominantes con los otros y con el mundo. Las estrategias feministas, incluyendo la práctica de ”empezar por una misma”, reclamar lo personal como político, y volver a trazar genealogías alternativas, han usado el lenguaje como una forma de liberación así como de reconexión con el mundo material. Este vínculo liberador vuelve a proponerse como una técnica para confeccionar e identificar eco-narrativas efectivas. Aquí, las estrategias feministas se cruzan con las operaciones culinarias químicas y sociales a través de la discusión de tres recetas ligadas a los orígenes mediterráneos de la autora: un pudin de leche, pasta fresca sin huevo, y un tipo de pan de granos ancestrales. A través de los procesos de vinculación y de moderación, comunes a las preparaciones que usan almidón, el análisis demuestra que un lenguaje almidonado usado tanto para vincularnos (a la vida material) como para moderar (las estructuras de poder) tiene un enorme potencial ecológico. Aunque sirva principalmente para académicos en estudios italianos y ecocrítica, este método culinario promueve adaptaciones a otras culturas culinarias e identidades de género

Knowledge Through Things: A New Perspective on Crepuscular and Futurist Avant-Garde

This dissertation provides a first systematic English-language study on Crepuscularism. Challenging the common critical understanding that reduces Crepuscularism to a pre-modern poetic regression while identifying Futurism with Marinetti's hymn to technological progress, I argue that these two Avant-Gardes share similar reactions to the modern bourgeois paradigm, both at a cognitive and ontological level. Overcoming the ghettoization of Crepuscularism as a provincial Italian phenomenon, the first chapter maps the historical and cultural setting of this movement, illustrating its intersection with philosophy, visual arts, and mysticism. In the subsequent chapter, I borrow from Bruno Latour's thesis that modernity encounters its limits in dealing with cross-category relationships such as nature-culture and human-thing. Crepuscularism expresses its Avant-Garde role by ushering in an anti-modern discourse on hybridization that Futurism inherits and further develops. The third chapter explores how the two currents envision cognition as immediate intuition and participative immersion that entails also ignorance, understood as maximum freedom of knowing. In chapter four, I enter the field of "thing theory", using categories introduced by Bill Brown and Remo Bodei, to analyze how the Crepuscular and Futurist "poetics of things" express a pan-animism of matter. Chapter five adopts key-concepts from Julia Kristeva's essay Powers of Horrors, to explore how Crepuscularism and Futurism open the boundaries of the ego to the realm of things, experimenting with new anthropotecnics, characterized by fluid constructions of body and gender. I dedicate the last section to the analysis of relational cognition, understood as a form of uncodified communication, such as Crepuscular silence and Futurist noise. Doctor of Philosoph

A Fairy-Tale Noir: Rewriting Fairy Tales into Feminist Narratives of Exposure

This article introduces the fairy-tale noir, a subgenre of fantasy-noir fiction that is particularly present in the work of Italian women writers, including Laura Pugno, Simona Vinci, Nicoletta Vallorani, and Alda Teodorani. This subgenre adopts fairy-tale topoi and characters to elaborate on the theme of vulnerability from feminist and environmental perspectives. Vulnerability is an intrinsic feature of fairy tales (texts that are continually performed and modified, but that remain “non-appropriable”); it is also a pivotal characteristic of the young protagonists of these fictional universes, who are often exposed to abuse. The twenty-first-century fairy-tale noir redeploys the discourse of bodily exposure typical of traditional fairy tales by engaging in an environmentalist reflection on the experience of exposure that human and nonhuman bodies share. The genre also adopts the theme of vulnerability as openness to change and uses the unconventional families of fairy tales to discuss recent social changes in Italian families. Finally, fantasy noir recasts vulnerability to violence as a potential space of empathy, or biophilia, with the broader, nonhuman “family.” Exploring this overlooked genre ultimately shows how Italian women writers, who are still at the margins of the Nuovo Giallo Italiano, have successfully reinvented a male-dominated genre into a literary lens probing socio-environmental concerns, first and foremost gender discriminations

Vinculación y liberación: Recetas de narrativas ecológicas

Crafting narratives alternative to dominant discourses of natural-cultural depletion is one of the signature goals of the ecocritical “test kitchen.” This culinary analogy highlights deeper similarities: both recipes and eco-narratives create symbolic and material connections between people and the environment, which, in turn, enable transformative practices. But how can we craft messages that are generative of positive processes of transformation? Or, put it differently, what are recipes for eco-narratives? This article proposes a versatile method to test what uses of language and dynamics elicited by texts might produce environmental action. The culinary experiment draws on Italian second-wave feminism, a theoretical “cuisine” that has engaged with language to rework dominant relationships to others and to the world. Feminist strategies, including the practice of “starting from oneself,” the reclaiming of the personal as political, and the retracing of alternative genealogies, have used language as a means simultaneously of liberation and of reconnection with the material, embodied world. This liberating binding is repurposed as a key technique to craft and identify effective eco-narratives. Here, feminist strategies intersect with the chemical and social operations of cooking through discussion of three recipes tied to the author’s Mediterranean origins: a milk pudding, eggless fresh pasta, and a type of ancient-grains bread. Through the processes of binding and softening, common to preparations that employ starch, the analysis demonstrates that a starchy language used both to bind (us to material life) and to soften (power structures) has enormous environmental potential. While primarily serving scholars in Italian studies and ecocriticism, this culinary method invites adaptations across food cultures and gender identities.Confeccionar narrativas alternativas a los discursos dominantes del agotamiento natural-cultural es una de las metas distintivas de la “cocina de prueba” de la ecocrítica. Esta analogía culinaria destaca similitudes más profundas: tanto las recetas como las eco-narrativas crean conexiones simbólicas y materiales entre las personas y el entorno, las cuales, a su vez,  posibilitan prácticas transformativas. Sin embargo, ¿cómo podemos confeccionar mensajes que generen procesos de transformación positivos? O, dicho de otro modo, ¿cuáles son las recetas de las eco-narrativas? Este artículo propone un método versátil para comprobar qué usos del lenguaje y dinámicas obtenidas de los textos pueden producir acción medioambiental. El experimento culinario recurre a la segunda ola del feminismo italiano, una “cocina” teórica que ha interactuado con el lenguaje para reconfigurar las relaciones dominantes con los otros y con el mundo. Las estrategias feministas, incluyendo la práctica de ”empezar por una misma”, reclamar lo personal como político, y volver a trazar genealogías alternativas, han usado el lenguaje como una forma de liberación así como de reconexión con el mundo material. Este vínculo liberador vuelve a proponerse como una técnica para confeccionar e identificar eco-narrativas efectivas. Aquí, las estrategias feministas se cruzan con las operaciones culinarias químicas y sociales a través de la discusión de tres recetas ligadas a los orígenes mediterráneos de la autora: un pudin de leche, pasta fresca sin huevo, y un tipo de pan de granos ancestrales. A través de los procesos de vinculación y de moderación, comunes a las preparaciones que usan almidón, el análisis demuestra que un lenguaje almidonado usado tanto para vincularnos (a la vida material) como para moderar (las estructuras de poder) tiene un enorme potencial ecológico. Aunque sirva principalmente para académicos en estudios italianos y ecocrítica, este método culinario promueve adaptaciones a otras culturas culinarias e identidades de género

“La poesia dopo la fine della poesia”: Visionary Realism and the Ethics of Playful Care in Aldo Nove's Twenty-First Century Poetry

This article examines the experimental realism that Aldo Nove has adopted in two recent poetry collections, A schemi di costellazioni (2010) and Addio mio Novecento (2014).These works similarly feature a time in which personal memories intertwine with geological elements. In doing so, they seemingly mark a break with Nove’s previous poetry and prose, concerned with a disturbing representation of late-capitalist lifestyle. I argue, though, that Nove’s cosmological poetry ushers in a new stage of the author’s material and visionary realism. His recent poetry represents the “material complexity” of the Anthropocene, while suggesting playful ethics of non-hierarchical coexistence with nonhuman agents. Nove retraces these perspectives of co-survival to the oft-forgotten origin of western thought, which—beginning with the Milesian School—is surprisingly rooted in the recognition of nature as the generative principle of life and meaning.At a metaliterary level, Nove’s twenty-first century realism marks a farewell to the twentieth-century tradition, while foreseeing new stylistic and thematic possibilities for Italian poetry. The author repurposes the polemic materialism of the avant-gardes and the anti-realist poetics of the “parola innamorata” into a thought-provoking reflection on the meaning of playful care in the troubled epoch of the Anthropocene.

“La poesia dopo la fine della poesia”: Visionary Realism and the Ethics of Playful Care in Aldo Nove's Twenty-First Century Poetry

This article examines the experimental realism that Aldo Nove has adopted in two recent poetry collections, A schemi di costellazioni (2010) and Addio mio Novecento (2014).These works similarly feature a time in which personal memories intertwine with geological elements. In doing so, they seemingly mark a break with Nove’s previous poetry and prose, concerned with a disturbing representation of late-capitalist lifestyle. I argue, though, that Nove’s cosmological poetry ushers in a new stage of the author’s material and visionary realism. His recent poetry represents the “material complexity” of the Anthropocene, while suggesting playful ethics of non-hierarchical coexistence with nonhuman agents. Nove retraces these perspectives of co-survival to the oft-forgotten origin of western thought, which—beginning with the Milesian School—is surprisingly rooted in the recognition of nature as the generative principle of life and meaning.At a metaliterary level, Nove’s twenty-first century realism marks a farewell to the twentieth-century tradition, while foreseeing new stylistic and thematic possibilities for Italian poetry. The author repurposes the polemic materialism of the avant-gardes and the anti-realist poetics of the “parola innamorata” into a thought-provoking reflection on the meaning of playful care in the troubled epoch of the Anthropocene.