Lyric Weapons - Desire and Anxiety in Italian Nuclear Poetry

As both a repository of foreign nuclear armaments and a nation devoid of its own nuclear power infrastructure, Italy is an exceptional laboratory for the cultural elaboration of ‘nuclear anxiety’ (Newcomb, 1986).  In a unique confluence of historical and socio-cultural factors, Italy has hosted, and continues to host, hundreds of American nuclear weapons on its soil, even as it closed its last nuclear reactors in 1990, making it the sole G8 nation without domestic nuclear power facilities. Furthermore, Italy harbored one of the most prominent Communist Parties in the Western world from the 1950s to the 1980s.

This lecture investigates the historical and cultural elaboration of ‘nuclear anxiety’ using Italian poetry as one of its main sources. In turn, it also provides a new framework to better understand some of the key markers of lyric poetry and the cross-fertilisation between literature and anxiety. This complex, nuanced, and vital relationship will be investigated through a series of texts by Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), Andrea Zanzotto (1921–2011), Elio Pagliarani (1927-2012), and Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996).

Roberto Binetti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, where he is working on his new book project, ‘Italian Poetry in the Age of Nuclear Anxiety’. He earned his DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford in 2022 with a thesis on representations of gender, history, and politics in Italian women’s poetry. His research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry, with an emphasis on the relationship between the lyric genre and cultural history. Among his past and forthcoming publications are: Poetics of Becoming: On Italian Women’s Poetry (Peter Lang, 2024), Contemporary Elegy in World Literature (Brill, 2024), Elegy Today. Resistance, Revision, Re-Mapping (JWL, 2023), and La domanda dell’inconscio: Lingua e vita interiore nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli e Andrea Zanzotto (Mimesis, 2024). He is co-founder of Italian Poetry Today and Non solo muse.

To attend this lecture in person, please complete the online registration.

This lecture will be livestreamed on the Department's YouTube channel.

All times stated in Eastern time.