Organiser: Alessandro Raveggi (University Ca’ Foscari); Chair: Riccardo Barontini (Ghent University)
Although modernism and the avant-gardes have often been considered urban movements and poetics linked to the proliferation and fascination of modernity, industrialization and technology (e.g. in Italian Futurism), there is a significant presence of the environment and environmentalism within global modernism, which would allow us to speak of an “Ecology of Modernism”. Recent studies have supported the concept of Eco-modernism (Diapers, ed 2021) or of a Green Modernism (McCarthy, 2015) and journals have recently studied the relationship between Modernism and Environment (e.g. Modernist Cultures, February 2021, 16, 1). This panel will focus on the creative relationship between nature, environment and ecology in literary modernism, from the early manifestations to contemporary times. Proposals for this panel can focus on the relationship with nature in both Western-centric and postcolonial modernisms, on the role of animals, plants and fungi as a presence or an inspiration, on the topics of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis, or even on the reinterpretation of the “giants” of modernism and late modernism (e.g. Joyce, Beckett, Stein, among others) under a new ecological light.
Presentations
Georgios Katsantonis (University of Patras) – From the Geographical Dimension to the Ecological Perspective in Pasolini’s Literature and Film
Salvatore Francesco Lattarulo (University of Bari) – «Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?»: An Ecomodernist Reading of Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno
Nurten Bayraktar (Cappadocia University) – Trans-Corporeality Opposed to Dead Matter in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Imola Nagy-Seres (Humboldt University) – Marine Modernism: Katherine Mansfield, Children, and Sea Creatures