Abstract
The project’s purpose is to create the first ecocritical atlas of Italian literature. LEDA (Literary Ecology in a Digital Atlas) will be hosted on a website with an interactive, hypertext-based computer system that can be used to map, visualize, and investigate the spaces of Italian environmental literature, in the period going from the Great Acceleration to the Pandemic. LEDA aims to become Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca MUR - BANDO 2022 PNRR the first systematic survey of Italian environmental literature conducted on a corpus of prose works focused on and problematizing the human-space and human-environment relationships. The project focuses on three main aspects: 1. How space and environment can be studied. A hundred prose works, both fictional and nonfictional, will be included in the atlas’s map. These texts will be investigated from an innovative critical perspective which focuses not only on thematic features of the texts, but also on their structural and formal issues. More specifically, space will be considered in the light of the narratological tools developed during the creation of the atlas. 2. How space and the environment can be mapped. Drawing on the expertise of specialists in digital humanities and visual data, texts and Italian geographical areas will be related through an interactive and hypertextual map, thereby illuminating the relationship between real and textual spaces. On the one hand, LEDA will provide a visual representation of the ecocritical and geocritical categories on which the project focuses; on the other hand, it will provide an effective method for visualizing the territories presented and discussed in contemporary environmental literature. 3. How space and environment can be narrated. The contents of LEDA will be disseminated through initiatives in specific Italian areas which will directly involve citizens. Such operation will allow participants’ attention to be focused on the dynamics of interaction with the surrounding space and urban environment; at the same time, it will build or implement an awareness of the areas involved and of the issues related to them. The research units will work closely with research scholars to investigate the texts and to create several study paths within the atlas, which will be put online thanks to the work of a specifically designed computer scientist. The goal is to provide scholars working in the field of environmental humanities and ecocriticism with an expandable model for current and future studies, which might be extended to a larger scale and a broader time period. Finally, the collected data will be used to address some specific issues that will emerge throughout the research; also, they will be the object on which several articles and essays to be published on open access platforms will draw. This critical corpus will be disseminated during international study sessions and workshops open both to other researchers and to a non-academic public.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Riccardo Gasperina Geroni
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica
Coordinator:
Libera Università di lingue e comunicazione IULM-MI(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 77.000,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
30/11/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
