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Project Code [GOIPG/2024/5116]
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Project title
Climate Change and Urban Space in Contemporary Italian Literautre
Primary Funding Agency
Taighde �ireann-Research Ireland
Co-Funding Organisation(s)
Lead Organisation
University College Cork (UCC)
Lead Applicant
Not listed
Project Abstract
As reported by Climate ADAPT (The European Climate Adaptation Platform), European cities face significant impacts from climate change, both now and into the future. How has literature anticipated and participated in the ongoing debate on the effects of climate change on urban space? By analyzing how the narration of the urban landscape in Italian contemporary novels evolves in response to climate change, my project will insert itself in an interdisciplinary and transnational debate demonstrating how literature can provide direct insight into this pressing real-world problem enabling a broad audience to visualize the effects of climate change on urban space through the narrative language. Italian literature offers a privileged case study in relation to climate change effects on urban space, since it has an intermediate position between the global South and the global North and is a crossroad of migration flows increasingly caused by climate change (Climate ADAPT, 2023). Texts that in various ways engage with issues of climate change spanning from the 1972 to 2020 will be analyzed (among them: Calvino, 1972; Morselli, 1977, Cassola, 1982, Benni, 1990, Pugno, 2007, Ronco, 2013 and Cutrufelli, 2020) to investigate how they anticipated, thematized, represented and provided an understanding of the different faces that climate change can take such as flooding, increased temperatures, drought, fires, storms and rising seas and how the urban landscapes are narratively reshaped in response to them. Particular attention will be paid to the different ways in which the discourse on urban space and climate change is articulated through different sub-genres such as utopia, dystopia and eco-dystopia. The analysis will employ traditional literary qualitative methods supported by final quantitative research. The interdisciplinary perspective, whilst solidly grounded in literary theory, draws also from international cultural debates on urban and environmental issues considering, at the same time, contributions of architects.
Grant Approved
�93,000.00
Research Hub
Climate Change
Research Theme
3. Climate Solutions, Transition Management and Opportunities
Initial Projected Completion Date
31/08/2027