Books by Daniela Fargione
Ambiente Dickinson, frutto di diverse collaborazioni e intrecci artistici (critica letteraria, po... more Ambiente Dickinson, frutto di diverse collaborazioni e intrecci artistici (critica letteraria, poesia, scultura, fotografia), è innanzitutto l’indagine dei vari ambienti in cui visse e operò il “mito di Amherst”, primo dei quali la Homestead paterna, un’enorme casa di mattoni rossi circondata da un ampio giardino. È lì che tra il 1830 e il 1886 si consumò un’esistenza complessa ed enigmatica, capace ancora oggi di generare interrogativi sulle relazioni tra dimora umana, ruoli di genere, natura e scrittura femminile. Tali relazioni, qui affrontate con un approccio ecocritico, intendono dimostrare come la dissacrante poesia di Emily Dickinson fosse un potente veicolo di sovversione della predominante ideologia della domesticità e al contempo sonoro controcanto della retorica del dominio. Ne consegue che, al fine di valutare il suo apporto al discorso sulle interrelazioni tra la natura e la cultura americana del diciannovesimo secolo, occorre collocare la sua opera in una prospettiva di netto contrasto con la tradizione del tempo. Pur non dimostrando mai una piena consapevolezza ecologica, e dunque raramente considerata “nature poet” a tutti gli effetti, Emily Dickinson offrì (come tutti gli ecopoeti secondo le indicazioni fornite da J. Scott Bryson) “una visione del mondo che riconosce il valore dell’interrelazione tra due […] desideri interdipendenti, entrambi tentativi di rispondere all’attuale divorzio tra l’umanità e il mondo più-che-umano”, mondo che la poetessa esplorò dai suoi personalissimi osservatori (le colline e i boschi circostanti, il giardino di casa, la stanza al primo piano) per approdare alla moderna conclusione che tale “conoscibilità” ha limiti che né il patriarcato, né la Chiesa e nemmeno la scienza sono in grado di superare.
Edited Books and Journals by Daniela Fargione
Embracing the intersectional methodological outlook of the environmental humanities, the contribu... more Embracing the intersectional methodological outlook of the environmental humanities, the contributors to this edited collection explore the entanglements of cultures, ecologies, and socio-ethical issues in the roles of trees and their relationships with humans through narratives in literature and art.
Il Mulino, Percorsi, 2018
Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie è il risultato del confronto e del dibattito aperto di... more Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie è il risultato del confronto e del dibattito aperto di vari studiosi di scienze umane ambientali (o environmental humanities) su aspetti cruciali dell’Antropocene, l’era geologica in cui all’attività di un’unica specie – quella umana, appunto – si è attribuita la causa principale delle alterazioni sulla Terra. I saggi qui raccolti riflettono un ampio ventaglio di discorsi articolati con un preciso approccio critico interdisciplinare – dalla filosofia alla meteorologia, dalla letteratura alla sociologia, dalla linguistica alla cinematografia. L’obiettivo è far luce sull’antropizzazione che si ripercuote su clima, territori, paesaggi, sul sistema delle acque, su cibi e migrazioni, offrendo una visione panoramica – locale e globale – dei problemi ambientali in tutte le loro sfaccettature. Lungi dal voler offrire soluzioni consolatorie, il volume intende rinnovare la nostra episteme, erroneamente radicata nella profonda e netta frattura tra natura e cultura e nella neo-illuminista atomizzazione disciplinare. La porosità tra discipline e l’interconnessione osmotica di saperi pongono infatti una sfida, anche didattica, che questo volume fa propria.
Articles by Daniela Fargione
Artifara, 2025
di fenomeni quali il cambiamento climatico antropogenico, l'innalzamento dei mari e l'estinzione,... more di fenomeni quali il cambiamento climatico antropogenico, l'innalzamento dei mari e l'estinzione, i Blue Studies hanno esplorato i profondi legami tra i vari "corpi d'acqua" (Neimanis, 2017)-umani, non umani, più che umani-che coabitano (nel)l'oceano. Le sirene, in qualità di umanoidi acquatici, sono creature sovversive e detengono il potere di mediazione tra queste diverse forme di vita (Alaimo, 2008). Resistendo a ogni categorizzazione di genere e all'impermeabilità di ogni confine ontologico, le loro storie profilano possibili parentele immaginarie e nuovi futuri multispecie. I due esempi qui proposti sfidano prospettive umanocentriche e contemplano "nuove prassi per un comune farsi-mondo" (Braidotti, 2017: 41): "The Feejee Mermaid", falsa tassidermia e creatura mummificata, esposta all'American Museum di Barnum e il romanzo Mermaids in Paradise (2015) di Lydia Millet.
RSA Journal, 2023
Lydia Millet’s novels have gained momentum within environmental discourses since they often prove... more Lydia Millet’s novels have gained momentum within environmental discourses since they often prove how “looking outside the human is what gives human life its meaning” (Millet 2022). In this article, I analyze How the Dead Dream, the first novel of a trilogy published almost ten years after J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (2001), the novella written for 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. Millet’s book, I argue, is a direct reply to Coetzee’s invitation to reconsider the place of the human vis-à-vis the other-than-human within the complex framework of posthumanism. This implies a recession of the onto-epistemological and ethical divide among species that saturate popular discourses on extinction. Drawing on material ecocriticism and, especially, on Stacy Alaimo’s research (Exposed, 2016), I investigate and critique different forms of epistemological impermeability, such as the assumed domestic safety, cleanness, and the sovereignty of the (male) Western subjectivity. By tracing the radical transformation of T., the main character in the book and rapacious speculator, I demonstrate how the aesthetic and the ethical intersect in the narration of this story of coevolution and cohabitation.
2023. «What the Hell!»: l’Inferno dei traduttori americani da Longfellow a Mary Jo Bang
Traduzioni dantesche. Studi e ricerche, 2023
Breve storia delle traduzioni dell'Inferno dantesco in inglese americano (da Longfellow a Mary Jo... more Breve storia delle traduzioni dell'Inferno dantesco in inglese americano (da Longfellow a Mary Jo Bang)
Le SImplegadi, 2021
The recent efflorescence of fictional writings and artistic works examined under the rubrics of B... more The recent efflorescence of fictional writings and artistic works examined under the rubrics of Blue Humanities (Mentz 2009), Critical Ocean Studies (DeLoughrey 2019), Hydro-Criticism (Winkiel 2019), or New Thalassology (Horden and Purcell 2006), testify a recent cultural shift from the land to the sea. In this article, the hydrosphere is analysed in two female Afrofuturist works – Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2010) – to address the global capitalist order and to imagine an aquafuturist multispecies aesthetics that springs from the countermemory of the Middle Passage and its undersea myths.
2021. Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes and the Archive in Richard Powers' The Overstory
In Trees in Literatures and the Arts. HumanArboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene. C. Concilio and D. Fargione (eds.). Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books – Rowman & Littlefield. Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series, pp. 245-261 , 2021
Richard Powers’ The Overstory ideally goes back to the writer’s first novel Three Farmers on thei... more Richard Powers’ The Overstory ideally goes back to the writer’s first novel Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985) and to August Sander’s photograph bearing the same title (1914). This is a portrait of three young men standing behind each other in a dandyish upright posture, wearing fancy suits and proudly looking into the camera, happy to go to their dance but completely oblivious that a second funereal dance is awaiting them: the Second World War and––very plausibly––death. The German photographer included this very popular shot in a massive and incomplete project called People of the Twentieth Century, an immense archive showing a pictorial survey of the German society’s class structure during the Weimer Republic. The Overstory is a very similar project. If we substitute Sander’s human types with tree types, physiognomic analysis with phytobiography, human time with tree-time, we might start to grasp the objective and scope of Powers’s last novel: an immense epic on time, imperiled biomes and human and nonhuman multiple entanglements. The overstory of the title, in fact, refers to both the trees’ perspective and to the time frame adopted in the story: almost four billions of years, where humans––in their transient appearance––have been somehow interrelated with trees and plants. Because of this scope, The Overstory has rightfully been considered an example of the Great American Novel: more than 500 pages of distilled erudition that slowly builds up a book “obsessed with the erotics of knowledge” to use Richard Powers’ words. But also, as I will try to demonstrate, with the idea of the urgency to imitate August Sander’s venture, to start a process of visualization and documentation of trees, an archival project that draws on history, truth, memory, empathy and is dictated by the peril of death, by the threat of extinction. Similarly to Sander’s portfolio of “archetypes,” Richard Powers’ nine characters portrayed in the book may be seen as human archetypes of the Anthropocene––each of them paired to a matching arboreal companion––and thus attesting to the inventorial agenda of this project. One in particular, Nicholas Hoel, an environmental artist who corresponds to the American chestnut that survives the decimating blight on the family’s Iowa farm, is the last to inherit a long standing tradition started by his great-great-grandfather one hundred years earlier: to take a photo of the tree the same day in March. And yet, as Richard Powers writes: “The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame.” The Overstory is finally a novel about time and time recording, which is a ceaseless and paradoxical activity for trees as they tell the time when they stop living: their concentric bands are another way of indexing, another catalogue of seasons and experience, another way to photograph and elude death: “Dendrochronology—the science of studying time by way of trees—is a postmortem practice encircled by beginnings and endings” (Murphy 2018).
CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2019
The exploration of alternative foodscapes is a clear attempt at re-localizing food in contrast wi... more The exploration of alternative foodscapes is a clear attempt at re-localizing food in contrast with agro-industrial globalization and its environmental, economic and social unsustainability. Art has dramatically contributed with speculations on what has been called "survival food". This paper analyzes three case studies: The Next Menu, a gastronomical art project designed to imagine a future supper and explore new or overlooked sources of nutrition to respond to climate change constraints; the De-Extinction Dinner by the Center for the Genomic Gastronomy, an experiment in cross-pollination of amateur science with multimedia art; Dana Sherwood's work involving decadent cakes to feed non-human animals with the purpose to understand interspecies relations.
CIRSDe. Un progetto che continua. Riflessioni e prospettive dopo 25 anni di studi di genere., 2018
Recently, the broader impact of climate change and extreme weather events has presented us with u... more Recently, the broader impact of climate change and extreme weather events has presented us with unprecedented challenges. Literature and the arts have been slow to take up this subject, although a new repertoire has recently sprung. All over the world, novelists have contributed to the creation and spread of a new genre (Cli-Fi Fiction or Eco-Fiction), which has received great consensus. Although most of these literary works still perpetuate gender and environmental inequalities, a few others have been able to translate scientific jargon and formulas into images and emotions, offering environmental visualization. This applies to Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, where recklessly flippant characters (Internet and the media included) intermingle with more responsible and caring human beings acting within a community where the spiritual, the political, and the scientific are tightly interconnected with the natural. The meeting of two species fighting for survival – monarch butterflies with their aberrant flight behavior and a woman ready to jeopardize her respectability to break with her alienating routine – is a question of latitude. Both deserve a chance; for both education will be the answer, eventually proving that the denials of skeptics and the complacency of believable people may be challenged by an eco-pedagogical program.
Le Simplegadi, 2017
Anita Desai's The Artist of Disappearance opens with the first line of "Ever-ness" by Jorge Luis ... more Anita Desai's The Artist of Disappearance opens with the first line of "Ever-ness" by Jorge Luis Borges to suggest that nothing can be forgotten except for what is not strong enough to become memory. If oblivion is the main theme of this collection, the eponymous story illustrates the need to preserve (mainly from forgetfulness) both cultural and natural artworks. The ethical role of the artist as transmitter of values, together with artistic travail as a tool of preservation are particularly evident in Desai's reference to Nek Chand's unauthorized "Rock Garden". In this article I explore the literary representation of desecrated natural and cultural heritage, postcolonial India's destruction of naturecultural biodiversity, the decentralization of the human, and the agency of elemental materiality.
Also in the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, food has become an ideal site of critic... more Also in the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, food has become an ideal site of critical debates, which are often intertwined with issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, age, and species. Because of the growing awareness of our current ecological crisis, of the growing disparity in wealth, and of the abrogation of both human and nonhuman rights connected to food production, distribution, access, and consumption, many writers have published works with the intent to condemn unsustainable food practices and politics. Contemporary American literatures represent a rich and diversified reservoir of case studies. In this article I analyze the contributions of two women writers, Barbara Kingsolver and Gloria Anzaldúa, as examples of different discourses on food. Each case illustrates some ethical issues and their implications for diverse stakeholders in food systems.
This article analyzes Edward Burtynsky’s Shipbreaking (2009), a controversial photographic projec... more This article analyzes Edward Burtynsky’s Shipbreaking (2009), a controversial photographic project that inquires into the representation of environmental corruption and economic exploitation 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.
No 8 (2016): Il sublime e le arti
By opposing the dualistic paradigm implicated in the Kantian sublime and eventually resulting in ... more By opposing the dualistic paradigm implicated in the Kantian sublime and eventually resulting in man’s mastering of the material world, this essay upholds Christopher Hitt’s notion of “ecological sublime” as a more respectful mode to relate with the natural environment. Hitt’s revision of the sublime is significant to overcome the false separation of nature and culture (the concept of “internaturality” is here offered in substitution), while fostering the abrogation of the anthropocentric stance that deeply marked the first phases of American history. Despite the multiple contradictions emerging from both their writing experiments, John Muir’s essays and Emily Dickinson’s poetry are here proposed to articulate a more biocentric view of the interlacings of the human and nonhuman.
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Books by Daniela Fargione
Edited Books and Journals by Daniela Fargione
Articles by Daniela Fargione