The environment is still being shaped by anthropocentric acts, facing continuous destruction, and reverberating catastrophic effects on numerous species, including humans both as individuals and as communities. This panel wants to contribute to the ongoing debate about the necessity to improve the human relationship with the environment, with nature, and the need for a significant, long overdue change of the current course of action. The ongoing unscrupulous devastation can lead to extreme outcomes such as extinction, announcing the termination of numerous representations of life in various forms. Yet, a strong resistance to this threat can be encountered in various contexts and is defined in disparate ways through diversified means of communication.

From this perspective, what does it mean to think about extinction and how does it help to redefine the relationship between humans and the environment? How is the desire to resist and oppose extinction represented in contemporary Italian literature, cinema and media? How and to what extent do those forms of resistance grant survival, protection, and preservation? Is there a remedy or a cure to the threat of death, disappearance, and eternal silence?

This panel wants to consider the various forms of resistance that emerge in those contexts where complete annihilation represents a constant threat and invites to explore the numerous representations and implications of the outcomes in 20th-21st-century Italian literature, cinema, and media studies.

Please submit your abstract online at this link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19916

Format:

• Abstract - 200-300 words
• Title - no longer than 100 characters

NeMLA Presenter Policies can be found at this link: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/policies1.html

Acceptance notification will be sent by October 15, 2022.

For any questions, please contact the panel chairs: Daniele Santucci (santucci2@wisc.edu) and Giampaolo Molisina (molisina@wisc.edu)