Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity

Acknowledgements
Praise for Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: How Italians Became Posthuman
Works Cited
Part I: Becoming Posthuman
Chapter 2: Giacomo Leopardi’s Book of the Future: The Zibaldone as an Encyclopedia for the Ecosophical Posthuman
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in Pirandello’s Fiction
1 Introduction
2 Posthuman Comedy: Pirandello, Balzac, and the Continuum of Nature
3 Cosmic Irony and Its Thresholds
4 Pirandello’s Modernist Tortoise
5 The Tortoise and the Grasshopper: “Paura d’esser felice”
6 “I’m in luck! I’m in luck!”: Myshkow and the Tortoise
7 Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives in Laura Pugno’s Narrative
1 Introduction
2 A Hybrid Form of Realism
3 Posthuman Mermaids
4 Animal Irreducibility
5 La ragazza selvaggia: Returning to Nature
6 Beyond the Thin Film of Civilization
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
1 Writing the Posthuman Subject
2 Lina’s Nonhuman Gaze: The Written and the Visual
3 Genetically Determined and Performed Identities: Lina’s Vanishing and the Digital World
4 Conclusion: A Note on Ferrante’s Identity
Works Cited
Part II: Technology and Identity
Chapter 6: The Stuff We Are Made Out Of: Contemporary Poetry in Italy and Our World Model in the Era of Digital Reproduction
1 The Paradox of the Canon
2 Becoming Anthology
3 From Invention to “Re-shuffling”
4 Emphasis on the I
5 “Cinematic” Poetry
6 What Happens with the TV
7 Alternative Platforms
8 Stirring Still
9 Digital Flow and Book Format
Works Cited
Chapter 7: “Ancora non raggiungibile”: Mobile Phones and the Fragmented Subject in Italian Fiction
Works Cited
Chapter 8: Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language, Gendered Technology, and the Female Body in Luciano Bianciardi and Tiziano Scarpa
1 The Milanese Secretary, Her Telephone, and the Loss of Femininity in Bianciardi’s La vita agra
2 My Mother Is a Washing Machine: Muddling with Identities in Scarpa’s “Madrigale”
3 What Language for Goddesses and Cyborgs?
Works Cited
Chapter 9: (Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and Android Motherhood in Viola Di Grado’s Novel Bambini di ferro (2016)
1 Introduction
2 Exceeding Human Boundaries: Monsters, Abjected Mothers and Buddhist Perspectives
3 Conclusions
Works Cited
Part III: Boundaries of the Human
Chapter 10: Unbearable Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity at the Borders of the Human in La vita oscena by Aldo Nove
1 The Challenge of the Posthuman in La vita oscena
2 Beyond Suffering
3 Beyond Pleasure
4 Beyond the nostos …
5 … the Posthuman Horizon
6 Conclusion: Beyond La vita oscena
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Lose Your Self: Gianni Celati and the Art of Being One with the World
1 “Fictions to Believe In” (“Finzioni a cui credere”)
2 Zen and Ecopsychology in Voices from the Plains and Appearances
3 Appearances (1987)
4 Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 12: The Living Dead and the Dying Living: Zombies, Politics, and the ‘Reflux’ in Italian Culture, 1977–1983
1 “Our life has become a thing”
2 Spectres of the Revolution
3 “La Morte! La Morte!”
4 Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 13: New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in Antonioni’s L’avventura, La notte and  L’eclisse
1 Introduction
2 Antonioni’s Female Characters: The Embodiment of Difference
3 Anna: The Disappearance of the Human, the Emergence of the Environment
4 Lidia, Valentina: The Exploration of the Material Vibrancy of the Environment
5 Vittoria: The Material-Discursive Continuum Beyond Anthropocentrism
6 Conclusions: Towards a Cinematic Ethics of Mattering
Works Cited
Index