Italy and the Bomb

Undergraduate / Graduate

A new form of literature, "indispensable for those who know and do not close their eyes" (Elias Canetti), was supposed to have emerged from the contemplation of the harrowing ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This new literature was supposed to have been a form of reconciliation; and it should have been able to engender, with its rhetorical devices, an antidote against the human instinct of destruction. This is the kind of literature that Elsa Morante calls for in her lecture "For or Against the Atomic Bomb", in which she chooses to tackle such a "gloomy topic", and yet one that "nobody should dare ignore"-nobody, and especially not a writer. During our course we will read essays and novels written throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that faced the issues posed by the atomic bomb. We will privilege Italian works, but we will also be attuned to the echoes of these themes within a global literary context. Topics to be investigated include the writer's ethical response, the scientist's responsibility and dilemmas, the spreading of apocalyptic fear, and the specter of humanity's death drive. Readings include texts by Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Leonardo Sciascia, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, among others.