Serenella Iovino: Death(s) in Venice: Bodies and the Discourse of Pollution from Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera.

The James K. Binder Lecture.

The Atkinson Pavilion at the Faculty Club, UC San Diego.

Sponsored by UC San Diego Dean of Arts & Humanities and the Department of Literature.

A reception will follow the lecture.

There are many ways to imagine the death of a city. Death is the end of a cycle, both an episode and a rule in the ecology of matter’s transformations. Death in Venice can have many faces, and many names.

It has the face and the name of Gustav von Aschenbach, the German nobleman who acts as the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s novel — or the face and name of Tatzio, his beloved 14-year-old boy. It can have the face and the name of hepatic Angiosarcoma, a cancer form spread among industrial workers by the Montedison, a petrochemical factory located in Porto Marghera, just one mile from the city. It can have the face of the waters, and tides and fluxes of energy generated by global warming.

These latter elements are coupled with the engineering systems implemented to control the ever-increasing high tides affecting Venice (the so-called MOSE barrage), with the unsustainable tourism of humongous cruise ships, and with the polluting activities normally caused by human everyday life in a delicate ecosystem such as the Venetian lagoon.

In this lecture I will concentrate on Venice as a text made out of embodied stories — a material text, in which natural dynamics, cultural practices, political visions, and industrial choices are interlaced with human bodies in issues of justice, health, and ecology.

Taking literary works, theatrical plays, and “living” cases as my focus, I will show how ecocriticism can amplify the (often unheard) voices of Venice’s reality. This discourse is part of my current book project. Titled Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, the book attempts to collect the "material stories" of some particularly dense places in Italy as segments of the vast ecological and eco-cultural horizon of this country. The idea is that, in this (local) scenery of (global) crisis, literature and critical practices enact forms of ecological resistance and cultural liberation.

A philosopher by training, Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turin. President of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment from 2008 to 2010, she is Research Fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. One of the most influential voices of European environmental literary criticism, she is author of four books and numerous essays and serves in the editorial boards of several international journals and publication series on environmental topics.

The James K. Binder Lectureship in Literature is made possible by Mr. Binder’s generous bequest and honors his wishes that we bring leading European intellectuals to UC San Diego to provide a forum for rigorous discussions of literary topics.