Editors:
- Offers a new and original perspective on canonical authors such as Italo Calvino, Luigi Pirandello and Elena Ferrante.
- Takes a timely look at the impact of human-animal interaction, technology, web-enabled devices and social media
- Gathers contributors from a variety of fields of specialisation
Part of the book series: Italian and Italian American Studies (IIAS)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Becoming Posthuman
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Front Matter
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Technology and Identity
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Front Matter
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Boundaries of the Human
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals,
inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a
new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve
thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of
modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena
Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism
to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative
configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
Reviews
“This volume of essays makes a powerful argument for the distinctiveness of the Italian contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. The contributors to Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity show how the culture that gave the world modern European humanism has also produced some of the most radical and searching critiques of what it is to be human in the modern and late modern age.” (Michael Cronin, Professor of French, author of Eco-translation (Trinity College Dublin))
“Brilliantly edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film expands the canon of posthumanist literary studies, enriching it with unexpected topics and voices. In a dazzling sequence of chapters on Leopardi, Pirandello, Elena Ferrante, Gianni Celati, Michelangelo Antonioni, and a number of contemporary storytellers and filmmakers, the authors of this fascinating book follow the human as it emerges from a tangle of organic and inorganic substances, DNA and energy sources, mobile phones and microbes, technology and politics. An engaging read, it is yet another testimony to the established presence of Italian culture on the scene of posthumanities.” (Serenella Iovino, Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill))
“Electing continuity and hybridization with alterities as the main cradle of existentiality, posthumanist thought may well be considered as a distinctive feature in the Italian culture of the last few decades. The re-evaluationof Giacomo Leopardi’s work, with the underlying legacy of Giordano Bruno’s panpsychism, inspires a new fascinating literature, more extrovert and emphatic than traditional intimist narratives, and in many ways more welcoming towards relationships and otherness. In this context, the present volume has the merit to offer a punctual panoramic view of Italian literary posthumanism.” (Roberto Marchesini, Philosopher and Ethologist, and the author of Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany)
“This wide-ranging volume seeks to expand our knowledge and understanding of the varied and intriguing ways in which Italian literature and film have engaged with the complex relationships between humans, technology, animals and non-human phenomena. The essays, which are located productively in relation to existing scholarly debates, draw effectively on recent and more classic theoretical reflections to explore a range of issues relating to posthuman embodiment,social alienation, and existential and ethical concerns. They offer original and compelling contributions to scholarship that enrich and expand ongoing debates about this increasingly crucial topic.” (Charlotte Ross, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, UK)
Editors and Affiliations
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University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Enrica Maria Ferrara
About the editor
Enrica Maria Ferrara is Assistant Professor of Italian at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of Calvino e il teatro (2011), Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Pasolini, Calvino (2014), and co-editor of Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages: Essays in Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre (2017).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film
Book Subtitle: Boundaries and Identity
Editors: Enrica Maria Ferrara
Series Title: Italian and Italian American Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-39366-3Published: 11 August 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-39369-4Published: 12 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-39367-0Published: 10 August 2020
Series ISSN: 2635-2931
Series E-ISSN: 2635-294X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 303
Topics: European Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, European Cinema and TV, Italian