ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for October 2023 is Serena Ferrando.
Serena Ferrando is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and Italian at Arizona State University. Her current book project, tentatively titled Channeling Nature: Water, Plants and Animals in Italian Poetry, is an eco-digital study of water and the nonhuman in contemporary Italian poetry. The book is a case study for the need to harness the enduring might of poetry to generate, sustain, and promote collective narratives for the protection of nonhuman environments in urban spaces. Dr. Ferrando directs a digital humanities project on Milan’s water canals called Navigli Project. She also studies environmental and experimental noisescapes and develops multimedia projects that utilize sound mapping to create multisensory experiences of the world. Her work has appeared in ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Ecozon@, Italian Culture, Italica, Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, and the volumes Italy and the Ecological Imagination. Ecocritical Theories and Practices and Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Italy and the Environmental Humanities.
How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?
When I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I had a very illuminating conversation with Ursula Heise, whose Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) had recently come out. I had gone to her office hours to ask whether she would serve on my Dissertation Committee and left with a whole new vision for my research. She opened my eyes to the bourgeoning world of ecocriticism and transdisciplinarity. As a result, my research, teaching, and service today are oriented toward establishing conversations across fields and countries by bringing together approaches from both sides of the Atlantic while still being rooted in Italian Studies. An example is the forthcoming issue of Rivista di studi italiani on poetry and climate co-edited with Danila Cannamela, Francesca Nardi, and Gianluca Rizzo that collects contributions from Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. At the 2011 ASLE Conference I met Serenella Iovino, who encouraged me to pursue ecocriticism in Italian Studies at a time when it was still mostly an anglophone realm. I am extremely grateful to Ursula and Serenella for their mentorship and the impetus they gave to the environmental humanities in their respective countries. The rich and very collegial cohort of eco-Italianists that exists today was in no small part inspired by their work.
Lastly, growing up in the countryside and being taught by my parents to respect the land and all the creatures with which we shared it prepared me for a career in the environmental humanities. In the ecocritical texts I read as a graduate student, I discovered the language that I had been missing to articulate the sense of communion and co-dependency with the territory that I had felt as a child.
Who is your favorite environmental artist, writer, or filmmaker? Or what is your favorite environmental text? Why?
My tastes evolve with the books that I am reading and the movies that I am watching. Currently, my favorite filmmakers are Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti. I use their film L’infinita fabbrica del Duomo (2015) in my Italian Ecocinema course. It is a cinematic poem, almost completely free of dialogue but very resonant with posthumanist and material ecocritical calls to bridge the discourse/matter, culture/nature divide.
For many years, my favorite environmental text has been the collection Altri amici (1986) by lesser-known Italian poet, Daria Menicanti (1914-1995). Her poems are the textual equivalent of Polaroid pictures: snapshots of nonhuman bodies “flaunting their vulnerability,” to use an expression from Harryette Mullen, whose Urban Tumbleweed. Notes from a Tanka Diary (2013) I also admire. Any poem, in my opinion, is an environmental text because it opens the reader or the listener to the multitude of meanings that cannot normally be contained or expressed using traditional linguistic modes. In poems, these meanings exist in the enjambed breaks between the lines, which require a leap into the unknown of inexpressible significance. They also reside in the blank spaces between words and in the silences that are integral parts of poems. For this reason, I also find myself reaching for Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing toward God (1975), which is not an environmental text per se but is animated by a desperate longing to connect with the other-than-human that I think animates all poetry and much of today’s environmental writing.
What are you currently working on?
In the introduction to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, Jane Cooper states that poetry is “an ‘exercise’ on which your life may depend.” My book project delves deeply into the topic of poetry as a survival tool. The book rests on a simple but bold premise: The application of ecological thinking to poetry and the insights of poetry to ecological thinking to theorize, promote, and disseminate human behaviors and interactions with the other-than-human that honor the neo-humanist principle of the Symbiocene. The Symbiocene is the era characterized by multispecies coexistence, mutual support, and interdependence that Glenn Albrecht theorized in 2016 to oppose the current environmental woes of “corrumpalism,” or the destruction of social and biological systems enacted on a global scale by corrupt corporations and wealth conglomerates. The appropriate response to this deathly power, Albrecht proposes, involves “an act of positive creation.”
Responding with a resounding yes (and providing some much-needed hope) to John Felstiner’s 2009 question, “Can Poetry Save the Earth?”, in my book project I argue that poetry is an act of positive creation that can nourish the type of sensitivity toward oneself and toward the Other that reveals—to borrow Stephanie Lemenager e Stephanie Foote’s words—“the radical inadequacy, if not impossibility, of the human outside of multispecies relations.”
Poets use language to overcome the limitations of verbal communication and find new ways to establish non-hierarchical correspondences with the nonhuman world. For this reason, the aforementioned Rukeyser points to poetry as a creative form of resistance against a less-than-virtuous use of language as in the context of corrumpalism: “We are poets,” she writes, “we can make the words.” As a poet, working in a genre that is too often condemned as useless and marginal, Rukeyser recognizes the ability of poetry to envision alternative ways of living and of tearing down the walls that prevent human/nonhuman communication: “We are ruling out one source of power, one that is precisely what we need.” For this reason she (and I) wonder why we are not taught how to use poetry, especially when writing poetry can empower individuals to change the world: “The poem is an action.”
Ultimately, my book project shows why poetry is the perfect ecological tool: By allowing people to comprehend how we fit in the network of life on earth, it embodies hope in a new kind of planetary cohabitation.
What is something you are reading right now (environmental humanities-related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally? Comment briefly on why or how it inspires you.
Così parlò il postumano (2014) by Leonardo Caffo and Roberto Marchesini has allowed me to define more clearly some of the ideas with which I have been grappling, such as what type of humanity can be built from a horizontal relationship with animals without discarding or diminishing the human. Also, the book’s argument in favor of vulnerability and humility as the keys to humanizing the anthropos has helped with framing my idea of poetry as an ecological tool. Poetry opens the door to new ways of situating ourselves in the network of bodies and species with which our lives are entangled. Imagining other species and our interactions with them outside of existing hierarchical taxonomic systems, it brings to light the fluid and porous boundaries between individuals and their habitats, improving relationships and interchanges. In Marchesini’s reflections on how culture does not emanate from people but from conversations with the nonhuman I found validation for my argument that poetry transcends word-based traditional modes of expression and opens language to nonhuman communication. This is the reason why I think of poetry as an ecological tool—not in terms of the mere saving of the planet, but of an alternate manner of approaching (physically, geologically, cosmically, and existentially) the nonhuman bodies with which we share the Earth. I enjoy Marchesini’s answer to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum: Dialogo ergo sum or acknowledging the Other but withholding judgement. From this perspective, the boundaries between us and the nonhuman do not mark a separation but a threshold, a transition point. For this reason, Marchesini postulates an ontology founded on the other-with-me rather than the other-than-me, or an emphasis on affinities instead of differences.
I recently also started reading Unsettled (2021) by Steven E. Koonin, which provides an interesting perspective on the power of narratives as well as climate data and its interpretations. The book underscores the importance of rigorous research and of making room for hope in environmental discourse, which in my opinion are crucial for educating and supporting the next generations.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you? Why?
Lately I have been drawn to Italian scholars, particularly those working in the field of animal studies. The philosopher Felice Cimatti writes relatively short, but very poignant books. Filosofia dell’animalità (2013) and Il postanimale (2021) are powerful investigations into the “anthropogenic machine” that has molded us into parlesseri, a neologism that translates approximately as “speakbeings” or human bodies molded by language. Besides the compelling and very well-articulated arguments, the shorter format of Cimatti’s books allows one to spend an afternoon in the company of the author, immersed in an uninterrupted conversation with him, following his reasoning from beginning to end in just one sitting. There is an immediacy to this type of reading experience that I find very appealing and that I would like to emulate in my work since it does not sacrifice depth, complexity, or academic rigor.
Gilles Clément’s Manifeste du tiers paysage has inspired an article where I compare poetry to the vibrant but neglected areas that make up the “Third Landscape.”
On this side of the Atlantic, I find William Cronon’s work extremely inspiring—perhaps partly due to my students’ appreciation of his quintessentially American perspective, particularly on the topic of the “wilderness,” to which they relate very easily. It opens the conversation to questions of (dis)order, (in)authenticity, becoming (un)domesticated, and the naturalcultural continuum that are worth exploring in the classroom. Cronon’s work provides an anchor for the students who take courses with a considerable Italian component and benefit from relating Italy-specific questions to analogous ones in the United States.
Ultimately, I think I am very drawn to what is difficult to reach or simply unattainable such as total adherence to the earth in the 21st century or more-than-human communication. Similarly to Cronon’s wilderness, for which we long but (or because it) always eludes us, I see nonverbal transspecies communication—as a means to transcend the limitations of being human—extremely fascinating despite the fact that it essentially consists in an attempt rather that an attainment except in very rare and fleeting instances. That is probably the reason why I seek epiphanic experiences such as poetry, noise, and silence.
