Crisis, Catastrophism, and Nuclear Anxieties in Italian Poetry
(This session is online only and part of the annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Italian Studies (CAIS))
Organizers: Dr Roberto Binetti & Professor Christine Ott

This panel aims to discuss literary forms and elaborations of ‘crisis’ in Italian poetry from the Cold War up to the present day with a focus on four ‘movements’ that often characterise critical events: internalisation, anticipation, waiting, and aftermath of the event. Papers engaging with forms and expressions of catastrophism around nuclear anxieties are particularly welcome. Italy hosted –and, in fact, still hosts– on its territory hundreds of American nuclear weapons while housing the most prominent Communist Party in the West between the 50s and the 80s. As a result, since the second half of the twentieth century, Italy has represented a unique laboratory for the cultural elaboration of so-called ‘nuclear anxiety’. Lyric poetry and nuclear anxiety insist and depend on a productively unresolved contradiction: they both originate from a well-defined and individual subjectivity while also containing a collective dimension. In so doing, do they absorb the psychological dimension of something other than the self and extend it beyond its subjective boundaries, or, instead, they are tight up to an individual, rather than a collective, experience? What kind of temporalities develop as part of forms of nuclear anxiety and their literary manifestations? Papers engaging with the above questions as well as with questions of world literature, cultural history, environmental humanities, women’s writing, postcolonial studies, and migration studies are particularly welcome.

Please consider submitting an abstract of no more than 150 words and a short bio-bibliographical note by 15 March 2023 to Dr Roberto Binetti (roberto.binetti@st-annes.ox.ac.uk) and Professor Christine Ott (c.ott@em.uni-frankfurt.de).