Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age : A Poetics of the Bystander / Maria Anna Mariani

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mariani, Maria Anna, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian literature.

Atomic bomb in literature.

Italy--History, Military.

Italy.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Military history.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (191 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023

Summary:

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the nuclear age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy's status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling-and in many ways passive-accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney's dictum that "there is no such thing as innocent by-standing," the book frames Italy's fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction. Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age includes discrete chapters on the major Italian intellectuals of the time: Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia. Conscious of their own political marginalization, these authors address the atomic question through a wide range of experimental forms, approaching the nearly unthinkable theme in allusive and oblique ways. Often dismissed as disengaged, inconsistent, or merely playful, these works demand instead a political reading capable of recognizing their confrontation with the paradoxes of the nuclear age.

Contents:

Introduction

1 Familiarize the Unthinkable

2 Expand Responsibility

3 Sabotage Logic

4 Preserve the Capacity to Not Act

5 Look to Understand

Coda

Other Format:

Print version: Mariani, Maria Anna Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age

ISBN:

0-19-196489-1

0-19-269535-5

0-19-269536-3

OCLC:

1347029170