Basilicata And Southern Italy Between Film And Ecology

This volume offers an open, transdisciplinary living space (also green) through which to explore the different connections between Basilicata and Southern Italy, cinema, and ecology, and thus to reflect on the different forms through which the historical, cultural, and social contexts of Southern Italian regions have been variously identified and represented. In order to explore these connections, the volume embraces a wide range of perspectives that may all be grouped under the key term film ecocriticism, offering the reader a thorough analysis not only of the different ways of representing reality but also of the processes of signification through which reality itself can be understood, rethought, and transformed. This is the general framework within which the authors consider film as a proper, effective medium for ecocritical and ecophilosophical reflections concerning not only Basilicata (to which the greater part of the volume is dedicated) but also Southern Italy and, therefore, its history and its territories, communities, and identities. Furthermore, in an even more general sense, Basilicata and Southern Italy reconnects with the very idea of the South, and of all Souths, to which this volume is dedicated.

Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, Elena Past examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. She uses these films—Red Desert (1964), The Winds Blows Round (2005), Gomorrah (2008), Le quattro volte (2010), and Return to the Aeolian Islands (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing environmental questions such as cinema's dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema's ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world.

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

The first dedicated eco-critical reading of the cultural recreations of the Italian landscape, exploring the literature, film and art of the country.

The Richness and the Fragility of Italy's Humanised Environment This book, a translation of the author's original Italian Breve Storia dell'Ambiente in Italia (Il Mulino, 2015) aims to bring together the general lines of interpretation of Italian environmental history from the decades prior to national unification to the present day, laying foundations for the writing of national history from an environmental history perspective. The volume reconstructs processes of change in the use of natural resources in Italy, and the associated environmental and social consequences. The use in historical analysis of a polysemic concept such as 'environment' expresses the deep synergies in the history of Italy that have tied together nature and human activities, ecological and socio-economic issues. The ancient roots of settlement, early anthropisation by past civilisations and historical features of the processes of transformation of rural and agricultural landscapes to which large areas of the peninsula have been subject impose a historical reconstruction in which changes in the use of natural resources are closely intertwined with changes in the territory considered as a natural historical context, built and humanised. Furthermore, corollary to the great richness and variety of nature and landscape, the artistic and archaeological sites, agriculture, gastronomy and oenology, that have 'supported' the country in its rise to global political significance, is vulnerability in terms of geological fragility, hydrographic system and seismicity. The book aims to understand how Italy as a unitary state has ruled the balance of an area overwhelmed by the impact of an economic development model characterised by high consumption of natural resources and energy. With this in mind, an important focus of consideration is the relevance of public policies, and the relationship between policy-makers and the knowledge experts that influence them. The book is divided into four parts, corresponding to four pivotal moments: the decades before national unification and the global factors at work; the end of the nineteenth century, when economic take-off combined with a hygienic revolution; the effects of Italian transition from a rural to a highly industrialised country in the decades after the second world war; and the 1980s in which laissez-faire capitalism and the acceleration of destructive processes co-existed with the growth of environmentalism and public environmental awareness. The chronological division is accompanied by a focus on topics, including: the effects of global changes and the role of structural characters; the repercussions for environmental equilibrium of 'commons' disintegration and the triumph of property rights; the impact of industrialisation and the hygienic revolution; the transition from renewable to non-renewable energies; nature protection, from the first movement to political environmentalism; the acceleration of soil consumption and of hydrogeological instability; the destructive modality of the expansion of metropolitan areas; the effects of agricultural modernisation, consumer society and the waste problem; the growth of ecomafias and environmental crimes.

Valerio Ferme is the Harold and Edythe Toso Endowed Chair professor in Italian Studies at Santa Clara University. --Book Jacket.