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This bracing volume collects work on Italian writers and filmmakers that engage with nonhuman animal subjectivity. These contributions address 3 major strands of philosophical thought: perceived borders between man and animals, historical and fictional crises, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world.
List of contents
Preface: Mimesis: The Heterospecific as Ontopoetic Epiphany; Roberto Marchesini Introduction: Thinking Italian Animals; Deborah Amberson and Elena Past PART I: ONTOLOGIES AND THRESHOLDS 1. Confronting the Specter of Animality: Tozzi and the Uncanny Animal of Modernism; Deborah Amberson 2. Cesare Pavese, Posthumanism, and the Maternal Symbolic; Elizabeth Leake 3. Montale's Animals: Rhetorical Props or Metaphysical Kin?; Gregory Pell 4. The Word Made Animal Flesh: Tommaso Landolfi's Bestiary; Simone Castaldi 5. Animal Metaphors, Biopolitics, and the Animal Question: Mario Luzi, Giorgio Agamben, and the Human-Animal Divide; Matteo Gilebbi PART II: BIOPOLITICS AND HISTORICAL CRISIS 6. Creatureliness and Posthumanism in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò; Alexandra Hills 7. Elsa Morante at the Biopolitical Turn: Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible; Giuseppina Mecchia 8. Foreshadowing the Posthuman: Hybridization, Apocalypse, and Renewal in Paolo Volponi; Daniele Fioretti 9. The Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook: Animality, Posthumanism, and Meat in Laura Pugno and Wu Ming; Valentina Fulginiti PART III: ECOLOGIES AND HYBRIDIZATIONS 10. The Monstrous Meal: Flesh Consumption and Resistance in the European Gothic; David Del Principe 11. Contemporaneità and Ecological Thinking in Carlo Levi's Writing; Giovanna Faleschini Lerner 12. Hybriditales: Posthumanizing Calvino; Serenella Iovino 13. (Re)membering Kinship: Living with Goats in The Wind Blows Round and Le quattro volte; Elena Past
About the author
Roberto Marchesini, Scuola d'interazione uomo animale, Italy
Elizabeth Leake, Columbia University, USA
Gregory Pell, Hofstra University, USA
Simone Castaldi, Hofstra University, USA
Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University, USA
Alexandra Hills, University College London, UK
Giuseppina Mecchia, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Daniele Fioretti, University of Miami, Ohio, USA
Valentina Fulginiti, University of Toronto, Canada
David Del Principe, Montclair State University, USA
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Franklin and Marshall College, USA
Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy
Summary
This bracing volume collects work on Italian writers and filmmakers that engage with nonhuman animal subjectivity. These contributions address 3 major strands of philosophical thought: perceived borders between man and animals, historical and fictional crises, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world.
Additional text
"Animals and the Posthuman in Italian Literature and Film is an elegant and musing collection on what it means to be alive and thinking today. The volume contains a wonderful preface by Italian philosopher, Roberto Marchesini , who sets out the stakes of the work beautifully. Indeed, it has been a long time since I've come across such a powerful combination of erudition, cutting-edge readings of continential philosophy, and, though this may seem surprising given the title, humanity." - Timothy Campbell, Professor of Italian Studies and Chair of Romance Studies, Cornell University, USA
