“Through a Glass Brightly
A Posthuman Re-reading of Fausta Cialente’s Cortile a Cleopatra”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22005337 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maria Grazia Lolla (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | California Italian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2155-7926 • E-ISSN: 2155-7926 |
| Publisher | California Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5070/c3101047186 |
| OpenAlex | W3119263521 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
“Through a Glass Brightly: A Posthuman Re-reading of Fausta Cialente’s Cortile a Cleopatra ” begins by arguing that posthumanism is both a new paradigm in the humanities and the theoretically ill-defined sensibility of the Anthropocene. A pressing invitation to reimagine what it means to be human that is traversing simultaneously scholarship, political activism and popular culture, posthumanism can also be seen as a powerful lens that colors our perception of the past. While I make no claim for the historical continuity of a tradition of environmental consciousness and do not wish to project onto the past the philosophical stance of today’s posthumanism, my reading of Fausta Cialente’s 1936 novel Cortile a Cleopatra builds on contemporary feminist ecocritics’ and posthuman philosophers’ impatience with the legacy of humanism. Joining a new generation of scholars who bring to their construction of modernism a nuanced understanding of the continuum of the bond between the human and non-human, I argue that revisiting the novel through the hyperopic lens of a posthuman sensibility uncovers the outsize presence of the non-human and enables new interpretation of it. While also partaking in the modernist attack on realism, Cialente’s consistent attention to the non-human – animals, the weather, the material environment – also reads as an alternative figuration of the human and a valuable iteration of the “aesthetics of care” furthered by Josephine Donovan, as “a participatory epistemology” of the human animal bond
Aesthetics · Art · Humanism · Literature · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Scholarship · Sensibility · Sociology · Textuality · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |