“Poetic Geography and More than Human Humanism in Sardinian Literature from Grazia Deledda to Marcello Fois,” a lecture by Massimo Lollini of the University of Oregon.
This lecture will first address in a theoretical perspective the notion of “more than human humanism” based on a critical dialogue among philosophers such as Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor Adorno and Gilles Deleuze. Furthermore, the first section will introduce Vico’s idea of poetic geography as a key concept that may nurture and reinforce a relational idea of humanism nowadays so important in environmental philosophy and ecocriticism.
The second section of the lecture will study the notion of a relational, non-exclusively human humanism, originated from a deep listening of and response to the natural environment, in the works of the founding writers of Sardinian poetic geography: Grazia Deledda and Salvatore Satta. Lollini will focus on how these writers perceive Sardinia and the Mediterranean as constitutive of a sense of identity in which land and sea, history and nature intersect in inextricable circles. The Sardinian writers of younger generations, such as Alberto Capitta, Giulia Clarkson, Giulio Angioni and Marcello Fois, will also be considered as a further level of Sardinian poetic geography, one that faces the flattening, homogenizing forces of contemporary capitalist globalization. Finally, the conclusion will offer some reflections on the importance of the notion of poetic geography as necessary premise to a very different understanding of politics from the exclusively human humanism of contemporary political thought.
Co-sponsored by Italian Studies at Notre Dame and the PhD in Literature Progam.
Reception to follow.