L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria | Écocritique et écodiscours | 2-2016 | Milan | 2016

L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, Elisa Bolchi et Davide Vago dir., issue 2/2016

Ecocritica ed ecodiscorso. Nuove reciprocità tra umanità e pianeta/Ecospeak and Ecocriticism: A New Reciprocity Between Humanity and the Planet/ Ecocritique et écodiscours. Une nouvelle réciprocité entre l’humain et la planète »

http://www.analisilinguisticaeletteraria.eu/?p=1779&lang=en
Version papier sous presse.

Serenella Iovino, Un po troppo incorruttibile. Ecologia, responsabilità e un’idea di trascendenza 
Moving from a passage of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table in which God is defined as a “master of polymerization” who does not like “incorruptible things”, this essay examines the topics of environmental responsibility and transcendence in relation to ecology. Particular attention is devoted to H. Jonas’s thought and to the bond between his ethics in Das Prinzip Verantwortung (1979) and his idea of God’s impotence in Der Gottesbegriffnach Auschwitz (1987).
In conclusion, the essay considers the implications of these concepts and their literary illustra¬tion within the environmental humanities, especially in relation to environmental justice (e.g. Nixon’s slow violence) and object-oriented-ontology (Morton’s hyperobjects).

Keywords: Environmental humanities, ethics, ecology, transcendence, Hans Jonas, Primo Levi

Elisa Bolchi, An Air-conditioned Global Warming. The Description of Settings in Ian McEwan’s Solar
The three main settings of McEwan’s Solar, a novel described as “the first great global-warming novel” (Walsh 2010) are significant: from London, to the Artic Pole, up to the desert in New Mexico, these places are all described through the interior monologue of the anti-hero Michael Beard, a character allegorical of humanity’s greed for selfish over-consumption. As Beard moves in the real environment only through the non-places of supermodernity (Augé), the paper ana¬lyses the descriptions of settings to underline how McEwan uses them to write about climate- change in a new “novelistic” way (McEwan).
Keywords: Ian McEwan, ecocriticism, Solar, places, environment

Paola A. Nardi, “Direction? … There was no direction. The prairie stretched to the end of the world”. American Land and the Pioneer Woman
Black Soil, a novel written by an Irish pioneer woman, tells about her arrival and settlement in the Iowa prairies in the second half of the 19th century. The goal of my essay is to investigate the strategies the immigrant woman Nell Connor adopts to survive on the American frontier.
Keywords: American West, the frontier, the Pioneer Woman, space, place, ecocriticism

Erica Maggioni, “Earth! have they gone into you?” An Ecocritical Reading of the Relationship Between Man, Nature and War in Isaac Rosenberg’s PoemsThis paper considers some of the poems written by the English soldier-poet Isaac Rosenberg during the First World War in order to show his ecological awareness in the depiction of and reflection upon the devastating effects of warfare on the environment and on the man-nature relationship. By adopting an ecocritical perspective, his works will be studied in relation to con¬cepts of space and place, the peculiar features of the war zone, and the elaboration of the pastoral tradition. In conclusion, it will be suggested that the destruction of nature serves as a metaphor for the physical and psychological suffering of men.
Keywords: Isaac Rosenberg, First World War, ecocriticism, nature, earth

Elisa Ramazzina, Man and Landscape in Old English Literature 
The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between man and landscape in Old Eng¬lish literature starting from the assumption that, during the Middle Ages, landscape was not merely a physical space, but it was rather a complex dimension involving religious and moral aspects. Examples from poetic and prose texts will show how the natural world was usually hos¬tile and inhospitable. Mappae mundi will help determine how the Anglo-Saxons considered themselves in relation to the environment.
Keywords: Old English literature, landscape, mappae mundi, monsters, ecocriticism 

Anne Simon, Place aux bêtes ! Oikos et animalité en littérature 
An animal and literary study with an original interdisciplinary base, the zoopoetics not only allows to approach the animal nature of humans, but also to question the possibility for creative language to express the non-human relationships in the world. This thesis, less paradoxical than it may seem, leads to a consideration of literature as art of displacement or decentering. After having re-situated the French zoopoetics in the history of ecocriticism and of the Anglo-saxon Animal Studies, the essay will show how a living poetics is a matter of perspectives, of rhythms and forms. The conclusion will allude to the political dimension of a zoopoetics which is also, always, a zoopoethics.
Keywords : animal studies, anthropocentrism, ecocriticism, zoopoetics

 

Pierre Schoentjes, L’écopoétique : quand ‘Terre’ résonne dans ‘littérature’ 
Building on Ce qui a lieu: essai d’écopoétique (2015) this contribution explores how contempo¬rary French literature integrates environmental issues. It sketches how academic research can build upon the growing environmental consciousness yet remaining focused on the aesthetic of writing.
Keywords : environment, écopoétique, ecocriticism, contemporary French literature

 

Elisa Ramazzina, Man and Landscape in Old English Literature
The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between man and landscape in Old Eng¬lish literature starting from the assumption that, during the Middle Ages, landscape was not merely a physical space, but it was rather a complex dimension involving religious and moral aspects. Examples from poetic and prose texts will show how the natural world was usually hostile and inhospitable. Mappae mundi will help determine how the Anglo-Saxons considered themselves in relation to the environment.
Keywords: Old English literature, landscape, mappae mundi, monsters, ecocriticism

 

Laura Bignotti, Barthold H. Brockes: ein aufklärerischer Umweltschützer? Die poetische Wiederentdeckung der Schöpfung im Irdischen Vergnügen in Gott
Barthold H. Brockes’ poetry collection Irdisches Vergnugen in Gott (1721-1748) proposes a joy¬ful celebration of every element of Creation. Influenced by the English physico-theology, this work contributed to spread a new, positive perception of immanent reality, no longer condi¬tioned by baroque pessimism. If considered in an ecocritical perspective, these poems can be extremely relevant even today: the deep and reverent admiration for nature they express, orig¬inally geared towards the celebration of God, has the potential to point today’s readers to an empathetic and responsible relationship with nature.
Keywords: Barthold H. Brockes, nature poetry, physicotheology, ecocriticism, Irdisches Vergnugen in Gott

 

Davide Vago, La « porosité » du réel : sur quelques stratégies stylistiques d’André Bucher
André Bucher uses certain stylistic devices that aptly suggest the porosity of the world, since humanity, animals and nature are the interdependent protagonists of his novels. Some stylistic constructions evoke this environmental inversion: the personification of nature through extend¬ed metaphors or catachresis reproduces the vocabulary of an animal. Nevertheless, by avoiding excessive lyricism, Bucher emphasises that the human scheme of existence is incommensurable with regard to the plane of nature.
Keywords: André Bucher, porosity, stylistic structure, catachresis, plan of nature

 

Federica Locatelli, Poétiquement toujours, les Écologiques de Michel Deguy. Entretien, réflexions
In PauvreBelgique Charles Baudelaire asked himselfwhat follows: “Dirons-nous que le monde est devenu pour moi inhabitable ?”. The well-known contemporary poet Michel Deguy has shown the same concern in some of his latest essays, published by Hermann between 2009 and 2012, espe¬cially in Fin dans le monde and Ècologiques. The latter in particular will be the object of my study: I will establish a parallelism between the poetic discourse and the debate on the ‘logies’ and the o’ikos, making evidence of some stunning similarities. In fact, they both suggest that by taking things radi-cally – “radicalement”, as Deguy prompts in his text – that is to say literally from the roots, they help us understand and revive – “poétiquement toujours” – our transitory abode.
Keywords: Michel Deguy, ecology, logos, world, dwelling

 

Vittoria Prencipe, La natura impervia come strada verso la virtù. La figura di Catonenel IX libro del Bellum civile
The relationship between man and nature has been examined under several points of view since the antiquity, as emerges from the brief reflection presented in the first paragraph of this paper, which, for the rest, focuses on one of the many visions emerged from ancient Greek and Latin literature and philosophy.
Keywords: Ancient literature, role of nature, Cato, concept of virtue

 

Franco Lonati, I wish no living thing to suffer pain . Percy Bysshe Shelley e la dieta vegetarianaPercy Bysshe Shelley began a mild form of vegetable diet. In many of his works (A Refutation of Deism, e Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, Alastor) Shelley dealt with the issue of natural diet, not only illustrating its physical benefits, but also stressing the philosophical and ethical signifi¬cance of his radical choice. Shelley is now in fact regarded as a sort of tutelary deity by the ever¬growing followers ofvegetarian and vegan movements, and quotes from his works regularly appear on the homepages of the most popular vegetarian websites. My paper will focus on the origin and development of Shelley’s vegetarianism and his literary and scientific sources through the analysis of Queen Mab and the Notes to Queen Mab.
Keywords: diet, nature, Shelley, vegetarianism, veganism

 

Elena Past, Volcanic Matters: Magmatic Cinema, Ecocriticism, and Italy
Return to the Aeolian Islands (Fughe e approdi, 2010) chronicles director Giovanna Taviani’s journey to the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago off the coast of Sicily and setting for a host of films. Return documents the islands’ geological past in a study of ecological, and not just cinematic history. This essay begins to unravel the threads of a magmatic Aeolian landscape where volcanoes, cinema, and memory collaborate in the creation of more-than-human stories.
Keywords: Italian cinema, ecocriticism, volcanoes, Aeolian Islands, Giovanna Taviani, posthumanism

 

Daniela Fargione, The Rhetoric of Seduction, the Aesthetics of Waste, and Ecopornography in Edward Burtynsky’s Shipbreaking
This article analyzes Edward Burtynsky’s Shipbreaking (2009), a controversial photographic project that inquires into the representation of environmental corruption and economic ex¬ploitation faced by disenfranchised communities. The controversy depends on the incongruity between the aesthetization of the gritty subject matter the photographs exhibit (the waste of the world and human waste) and the artist’s stylistic strategy, which may improperly be seen as an example of ecopornography.
Keywords: ecocriticism, environmental justice, aesthetics ofwaste, ecopornography, Edward Burtynsky

 

Francesco Toniolo, Natura di guerra. Possibilità ecocritiche sullo sfondo dei videogiochi strategici
An ecocritical reading of three real-time strategy (RTS) videogames, which are set in different contexts (historical, fantasy and Sci-Fi), in order to identify, in the background of a genre domi¬nated by the ideology of war, a relationship between players and civilizations with the environ¬ment.
Keywords: videogames, environment, RTS, ecocriticism, war games

 

Caterina Allais, An Exploratory Analysis of ScienceBlog
A recent international project, Investigating Interdisciplinary Research Discourse, carried out at the Centre for Corpus Research (University of Birmingham) investigates the entire holdings of the journal Global Environmental Change as a model of interdisciplinary discourse (http://paulslals. org.uk/IDRD/). Another international research project carried out by the University ofLeicester and by two Norwegian research centres (University of Bergen and Uni research) regards the repre¬sentations of the future in English language blogs on climate changes. But what lexical features are employed as regards the new and increasingly widespread ecological sensibility? Do they carry a positive or a negative connotation? This question will be answered through an exploratory lexical analysis carried out on Scienceblog, a recent corpus of 103,175,233 words not yet investigated, which comprises a selection of posts and comments from the scienceblogs.com website, published from 2006 to 2014, now available on the online query system SketchEngine.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, ScienceBlog, Sketchengine, environment, lexical analysis

 

Costanza Cucchi and Sonia Piotti, Eco-fashion Lexicon: a Never-ending Story?
Due to increased awareness of ecological and environmental issues and greater integrity by the fashion industry, the terms ‘ecofashion’, ‘ethical fashion’ and ‘sustainable fashion’ have recently been gaining popularity to refer to garments which are designed and manufactured supporting ethnic communities and without harming the environment. New terms, such as ‘environmental’, ‘green’, ‘ecological’, ‘eco-friendly’, ‘sustainable’, ‘recycled’ and ‘organic’ have been used to qualify both garments and production practices, to the point that Hanlon (2009) observed that the potential creativity of language in the field of sustainable fashion “is never-ending”.
However, fashion experts as well as fashion scholars pointed out that the exact meaning of the terms related to the ecofashion movement is not always clear. This study aims to explore the lex¬icon of eco fashion from a purely linguistic perspective. Results support with linguistic evidence the claims regarding the cross-fertilisation of the terms related to the ecofashion movement and, in some cases, their lack of clarity.
Keywords: ecofashion lexicon, sustainable fashion, English lexicology, English lexicography

 

Nataly Botero, Stratégies argumentatives dans la presse ecologiste française : métaphores, jeux de mots et détournements
The essay looks at various strategies of meaning in the language of French ecological media, from the subversion of clichés to metaphorical mappings, word plays and implicit suggestions. The main point is to describe and analyse those “discursive images” not as rhetoric or style fi¬gures but as an argumentative strategy used by ecological press.<
Keywords : French ecological media, discourse analysis, metaphors, argumentation

 

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