Man in the Cosmos: Italo Calvino’s Cosmic Ecology in The Cosmicomics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2037-2426/22857Parole chiave:
Ecology, Human, Nature, Cosmos, Anti-anthropocentrism, Time, SpaceAbstract
Italo Calvino’s The Cosmicomics, despite its pluralistic openness to multiple critical interpretations by various theoretical and conceptual frameworks including post-humanism, science-fiction studies, postmodernism and many more, deals with the fundamental issue of the human’s physical and conceptual inseparability from Nature or the cosmos. The human’s inseparability from the non-humans (including animals, vegetation and inanimate matters) has profound ecological implications. What Calvino establishes in the mentioned text is the human’s inevitable and unconditional inclusion in Nature rather than his self-proclaimed, physical/conceptual exclusion from the same. This is vindicated by the fictional illustrations in the text in which the ‘human’ is posited as a mere member of the ecosystem, and not as its master. In this context, this article endeavours to explore and analyze the said ecological implications of the mentioned work in the light of some the established ecological theories and postulations.
Riferimenti bibliografici
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chandler, 1972.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Bhargava, R. N. et al. Ecology and Environment. Routledge, 2019.
Bolongaro, Eugenio. Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature. University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Calvino, Italo. The Complete Cosmicomics. Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver, Penguin, 2010.
Cavallaro, Dani. The Mind of Italo Calvino: A Critical Exploration of His Thought and Writings. McFarland, 2010.
Colombino, Laura and Peter Childs. “Narrating the (non)human: ecologies, consciousness and myth.” Textual Practice, vol. 36, no. 3, 2022, pp. 355-364.
Connoly, William E. “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium: Jour-nal of International Studies, vol. 41, no.3, 2013, pp. 399-412.
Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Peregrine Smith, 1985.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and forwarded by Brian Massumi, Continuum, 1987.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton University Press, 1972.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2007.
“Genesis.” The Holy Bible: King James Version. Ivy Books, 1991, pp. 3-54.
Hochman, Jhan. “Green Cultural Studies.” The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Eco-criticism, edited by Laurence Coupe, Routledge, 2000, pp. 187-192.
Howarth, William. “Some Principles of Ecocriticism.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, The University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 69-91.
Iovino, Serenella. “Ecocriticism, Cultural Evolutionism, and Ecologies of Mind: Notes on Calvino’s Cosmicomics.” CoSMo: Comprative Studies in Modernism, vol. 2, 2013, pp. 113-126.
Manes, Christopher. “Nature and Silence.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, The University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 15-29.
Mathews, Freya. The Ecological Self. Routledge, 1991.
McGurl, Mark. “The Posthuman Comedy.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 3, 2012, pp. 533-553.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, North-western University Press, 1968.
Modena, Letizia. Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis. Routledge, 2011.
Shepard, Paul. “Introduction: Ecology and Man – A Viewpoint.” The Subversive Science: Es-says Toward an Ecology of Man, edited by Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, Houghton Mifflin,1969, pp. 1-12.
Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Dowloads
Pubblicato
Come citare
Fascicolo
Sezione
Licenza
Except where otherwise noted, the content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License.