Anthropocene, Non-Human, Posthuman: Conversations in a World Literature Perspective

This seminar aims to investigate the relatively recent interest, on the part of literary studies, in the concept of the 'Anthropocene'. The seminar, held in Italian, will deal with literatures written in Nordic languages, English, German, Russian and French; the multidisciplinary approach to the chosen topic is granted by the different literary spheres of research of the professors involved. The seminar will be divided into three sections: 1) mythology, ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene (4 hours); 2) the non-human animal in Kafka, Coetzee Tolstoy and others (4 hours); 3) the posthuman: representations and functions of the vegetal and animal element in literature (4 hours). Students will be involved in deep critical analyses of the literary texts proposed in an interdisciplinary perspective.