ITALY'S LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE: CULTIVATING CREATIVITY IN CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

The course, taught by visiting professor Serenella Iovino (University of North Carolina) is part of the Interdisciplinary Activities of the Master's degree Programme in Environmental Humanities.

This course is intended to prepare students to critically approach texts, illustrate their content and methodology, and summarize them in class. Each student will be responsible for presenting assigned texts.
Our two main goals:
1. Train students to think critically and meta-critically, working across disciplinary boundaries.
2. Train students to develop their professional academic skills, bringing them at a higher level of self-awareness as scholars.

Advanced reading, speaking and writing knowledge of English (B2)

Italy’s Landscapes of Resistance: Cultivating Creativity in Critical Environments.
he course examines key environmental issues of contemporary Italy through some of its most iconic landscapes, training students to apply a trans-disciplinary methodology.
Topics include: Naples and the landscapes of ecomafia and volcanic eruptions; death in Venice as a literary trope and a petrochemical curse; earthquakes and political moves that shake territories, people, and ideas across time and space; the slow pace of wine, food, and environmental violence in Piedmont: these are the cases that this course will analyses. Using the trans-disciplinary methodology of the environmental humanities, we will heed the forces, wounds, and messages of creativity dispersed on Italy’s body, arguing that a literature, an art, and a criticism that are able to transform these unexpressed voices into stories are not only ways to resist, but also a practice of liberation. This seminar is intended as a forum where students can enrich their literary and historical background with a thorough examination of some of the most representative landscapes of Italy.
Adopting the interpretive methodology of material ecocriticism and the perspectival complexity of the environmental humanities, we will read Italy as a text: a material text where the wounds, signs, and multifaceted dimensions of the environmental crisis are scripted.
In order to do so, we will examine landscapes alongside and through literary and artistic works, trying to elicit the messages of resistance embedded in territories and the liberating creativities that emerge from them. At the end of this seminar, however, it will be clear that Italian landscapes are important not only per se, but also as lenses through which all cultural landscapes, with their crises and visions, can be recognized and interpreted.

Selected chapters from:

Armiero, M. and M. Hall (eds.), Nature and History in Modern Italy. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.
Iovino, S. Cesaretti, E. Past, E. eds. Italy and the Environmental Humanities. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2018
Iovino, S. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Iovino, S. and S. Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism. Ed. S. Iovino and S. Oppermann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Further readings will be communicated and distributed in due time.

In-class activities will be evaluated. You will prepare a 15-minutes conference paper, which you will read and present with the visual support of a Power Point (or other digital presentation programs).

Frontal lectures will be alternated with students’ presentations, class discussion, and group activities. Preparation is essential to the seminar experience. Take advantage from this immersive reading opportunity and bring your ideas and reflexive elaborations to the class discussion.

English

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Natural capital and environmental quality" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development