Department of Italian Studies Research Seminar Series

Poetry and Environment: an Analysis of Fabio Pusterla’s Bocksten

Alice Loda, University of Technology Sydney

Abstract

The relationship between humans and environment is crucial within and beyond the contemporary space. The discourse on environment has been framed in several scholarly transdisciplinary studies, and it  foregrounds many in academic, political and activist agendas. In this paper I argue that poetry can add to the understanding and sensing of the environmental discourse and contribute to a more fluid and less hierarchical interpretation of the relation between human-and non-human, in particular through the rhythmical discourse. To explore these themes, this paper develops a close examination of the long poem Bocksten authored by the Swiss-Italian author Fabio Pusterla. Pusterla is a writer, translator, teacher and scholar, as well as one of the most prominent voices of the present Italophone poetic scene. Bocksten, one Pusterla’s early works, was published for the first time in an eponymous collection in 1989, and then re-published in 2003.  Proposing a discourse on rhythm, subjectivity, and environment, this paper offers a new approach to study Pusterla’s work and aims to identify, more generally, a foregrounding transhuman intention within modern and contemporary Italophone verse.

About the speaker

Alice Loda holds a PhD from the University of Sydney (2017). She is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. Her studies seat at the intersection between cultural studies, migration studies, literary theory and stylistics. Her current research projects engage with translingual poetics in contemporary Italy, translingual and multilingual women writers, rhythm and environment in contemporary literature. Her research has been published on academic journals including Bollettino d’italianistica, Italian Poetry Review, Italian Culture, Ticontre. She is currently working on her first research monograph.

For more information, contact: A/Prof Francesco Borghesi – francesco.borghesi@sydney.edu.au

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