Bio
Salvatore Francesco Lattarulo is PhD in Contemporary Italian Philology. He studied and published works on Italian poetry of the twentieth century (Rebora, Campana, Montale, Sereni, Bodini, Verri, Risi). In the narrative field he has written essays on Italian novelists (Svevo, Fenoglio, Malaparte, Vittorini, Bassani, Buzzati). He is Subject Expert in Italian literature at the Department “Lelia” of the University of Bari. He taught Italian language and literature at the University of Stettin in Poland and has participated as a speaker in a lot of international conferences. Here are indicated only the publications on Italo Svevo: La sindrome del reo: complesso del martire e senso di colpa in Senilità di Svevo, in D. De Liso e V. Merola (by), La medicina dell’anima. Prosa e poesia per il racconto della malattia, Napoli, Loffredo, 2020; Sorella morte: il sacrificio di Amalia e il «grande misfatto». La femminilità negata in Senilità di Italo Svevo, Atti Congresso ADI, Roma, ADI, 2021; «Patria mia, io ti porterò la giustizia»: Svevo politico e l’utopia socialista, in E. Mondello, G. Nisini, M. Venturini (by), Contronarrazioni. Il racconto del potere nella modernità letteraria (Atti Convegno MOD 2021), vol. II, Pisa, ETS, 2023. On Svevo he has also been a speaker at other conferences whose final acts are in press: Antonio Magnano e Alfonso Nitti: la malattia del seduttore malinconico tra impotenza e inettitudine (CAIS Conference, Montreal 2023); Due figure di lottatori allo specchio tra Verga e Svevo: Gesualdo Motta e Alfonso Nitti (AIPI XXV Congresso, Palermo 2022); «Una confessione è sempre menzognera»: La coscienza di Zeno come autofiction (Convegno MOD, Napoli 2022).
salvatorefrancescolattarulo@gmail.com
«Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?»: An Ecomodernist Reading of Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno
The end of the last and accomplished Svevo’s novel (La coscienza di Zeno) can be considered as an example of eco-reading according to an intertextual survey that covers other author’s “corpus”’ points (novels, short stories, articles, essays) in order to submit the work to a broad-spectrum hypothesis of an eco-critical approach in a preliminary way. This interpretation goes through all its evidence, as it is said in the discharge of Svevo’s masterpiece that represents a devastating setting for humanity and nature and human beings will pay the consequences. Technological progress has triggered ecoclimatic changes that Svevo had predicted so far in advance and he had seen these as a lethal regression of the world. The pessimistic and alarmist tone of the last page of La coscienza di Zeno seems to agree with the denunciation of the urgency of the state of crisis, to fit in characters of a narrative genre, the catastrophic one, developed since the ’50s. Svevo focuses attention on the pause that divides a faraway and static past from a corrupt and accelerated modernity that hasn’t been able to collect and preserve the inheritance of an uncontaminated habitat, the most precious legacy left by our forefathers.