Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation by Serenella Iovino (review)

One of the first titles in Bloomsbury’s new Environmental Cultures series, Ecocriticism and Italy is not easy to place within any one field of study. Is it a work of landscape study, cultural criticism, social history? A few pages into the first chapter on porous Neapolitan landscapes—with a “Vesuvian anti-pastoral” narrative that moves fluidly from archaeology and literature to geology and urban studies—it becomes apparent that the book is all of these and more. Iovino makes post-disciplinary work look easy. And yet the apparent unity of literary, philosophical, and scientific approaches in Ecocriticism and Italy belies the difficult complexity of weaving compelling stories of ecological and cultural struggle that, while focused on Italy, have much to say about all interconnected human and nonhuman landscapes. The book clearly demonstrates ecocriticism as a nexus of critical narratives for the environmental humanities, from environmental justice and ecology to biosemiotics and cultural geography. It asks us to relocate environmental and bodily phenomena as they interrelate on local and extra-local scales, and it does so by compelling us to closely reassess and engage with our own intertwined, wounded, struggling, resisting landscapes.

In her 2006 Ecologia letteraria: Una strategia di sopravvivenza (Literary Ecology: A Survival Strategy), Iovino argues for the rise of a postmodern environmental culture as a means of strengthening place-based collective memory and of building new sustainable ideas for long-term ecological wellbeing. She frames survival as an inclusive and relational concept, not a competitive, self-centered one. The first part of the book is theoretical, dedicated to introducing ecocritical concepts to Italian readers, and the second is composed of comparative case studies of the work of Anna Maria Ortese, Clarice Lispector, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Jean Giono. In her later scholarship, notably the 2014 collection of essays Material Ecocriticism co-edited with Serpil Oppermann (which contains an earlier version of the chapter on Naples), Iovino has continued to critique overlapping boundaries between ways of knowing and places of human and nonhuman inhabitation, moving towards a non-dichotomous conception of the world as a layered collection of storied matter to be re-narrated, with language acknowledged as being inextricably connected to the very matter it expresses.

In Ecocriticism and Italy, this shifting of priorities is evident in the titles of the chapters, which focus on places as material narratives, starting with “The Bodies of Naples: A Journey in the Landscapes of Porosity,” moving north to “Cognitive Justice and the Truth of Biology: Death (and Life) in Venice,” then south again to “Three Earthquakes: Wounds, Signs, and Resisting Arts in Belice, Irpinia, and L’Aquila,” and finally returning north to “Slow: Piedmont’s Stories of Landscapes, Resistance, and Liberation,” which provides the subtitle of the book. In each chapter are the stories of various environmental wounds, the result sometimes of natural disasters but more often of human-caused catastrophes—from illegal toxic dump sites in Campania and industrial pollution in the Veneto to asbestos poisoning in Piedmont—but this is far from a litany of despair. Throughout the book Iovino works to reveal “these landscapes and more-than-human collectives” as “texts bearing material stories—stories of resistance and creativity that transcend their local reality, demanding to be read and thus liberated from their silence” (1). Many writers, from Goethe and Lucretius to Calvino and Borges, are also given close attention, as well as artists, philosophers, filmmakers, photographers, and other theorists—their texts, like the land, recognized as containing material narratives. One of Iovino’s main goals is to draw attention to accumulated “layers of missed cognitive justice,” a concept that she defines as a “radical form of justice based on the right to know and to choose accordingly,” all too often difficult to attain due to corporate or governmental deceit and intentional withholding of information (8). The collective re-embodied, -situated, and -empowered narratives that result, together with interpretations of various related literary and artistic engagements, constitute, she argues, “an interpretive and...