Greening Italy: Literature and the Environmental Imagination

Module code: IT3143

This module explores how contemporary Italian writers, artists and filmmakers engage with place and with ecological and environmental issues as a means of reflecting on the present and imagining the future. By engaging with key critical issues in the environmental humanities (such as environmental crisis, planetary garden, ecodisaster), we will discuss how the set authors and texts (drawn from different media and genres) articulate current anxieties around the environment, the place of the human being on earth, and the role of literature/the arts in contemporary society, while providing a sense of place and belonging through narrative storytelling and the work of imagination, thus offering hope for the future.
 
Topics covered include:

• Depictions of environmental change and loss
• Sense of place/sense of planet
• Walking; displacement
• Landscape aesthetics
• Critical plant studies and garden studies
• Sustainability