Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander - Hardcover

by Maria Anna Mariani (Author)

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy's status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling--and in many ways passive--accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney's dictum that "there is no such thing as innocent by-standing," the book frames Italy's fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction.

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age includes discrete chapters on the major Italian intellectuals of the time: Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia. Conscious of their own political marginalization, these authors address the atomic question through a wide range of experimental forms, approaching the nearly unthinkable theme in allusive and oblique ways. Often dismissed as disengaged, inconsistent, or merely playful, these works demand instead a political reading capable of recognizing their confrontation with the paradoxes of the nuclear age.

Author Biography

Maria Anna Mariani, Assistant Professor of Modern Italian Literature, University of Chicago

Maria Anna Mariani is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Primo Levi e Anna Frank. Tra testimonianza e letteratura (Carocci, 2018) and Sull'autobiografia contemporanea. Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi (Carocci, 2012).