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Explores the notion of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. It re-frames Italy's mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to re-think the role of the side-lined intellectual in the face of mass extinction.
List of contents
- Introduction: A Gray Zone of Responsibility
- 1: Familiarize the Unthinkable: Moravia
- 2: Expand Responsibility: Calvino
- 3: Sabotage Logic: Morante
- 4: Preserve the Capacity to Not Act: Sciascia
- 5: Look to Understand: Pasolini
- Coda: The World without Humans
About the author
Maria Anna Mariani is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Primo Levi e Anna Frank. Tra testimonianza e letteratura (Carocci, 2018) and Sull'autobiografia contemporanea. Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi (Carocci, 2012).
Summary
Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy's status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling--and in many ways passive--accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney's dictum that "there is no such thing as innocent by-standing," the book frames Italy's fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction.
Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age includes discrete chapters on the major Italian intellectuals of the time: Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia. Conscious of their own political marginalization, these authors address the atomic question through a wide range of experimental forms, approaching the nearly unthinkable theme in allusive and oblique ways. Often dismissed as disengaged, inconsistent, or merely playful, these works demand instead a political reading capable of recognizing their confrontation with the paradoxes of the nuclear age.
Additional text
Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age is an original contribution that enriches Italian studies by proposing an in-depth and groundbreaking analysis of the impact of the nuclear threat on twentieth-century Italian literature. Written in a direct and clear style, rich in critical and theoretical references that guide even the less experienced readers through the author's arguments, this is a text recommended for both scholars and students interested in exploring the Italian debate on the atomic question and the extinction of the species in the Cold War years, and to consider possible new interpretive paths."
