Category: Animal Studies

My dissertation “Trieste and the Migrations of Modernism: Fin-de-siècle Austria in the Italian Literary Landscape” (2009) includes a chapter on Kafka and Svevo (“Svevo’s Last Love: Kafka in Trieste and the Remapping of Italian Modernism”). I was surprised when I began working on the two authors that more had not been done on the many amazing animals of Italian literature, such as Svevo’s Argo in “Argo e il suo padrone,” who often seem to fit the growing field of Animal Studies. I expanded on my work on animals in “Kafka’s Italian Progeny.”

In the past, I gave several talks in which I discussed the potential significance of Italian literature for Animal Studies and Animal Studies. In 2011 in Oxford (Svevo at 150) I presented a paper on Svevo’s animals and Kafka, a talk that was soon after put up on-line. In 2012 I presented my work on my overall project, which included the discussion of Animal Studies and Italian literature, at invited talks at Berkeley (“‘Hu huh m hm uh cr cr. . .’: Talking Animals, Kafka, and Italian Literature”) and Chapel Hill, as well as at the Seattle MLA panel “Animal Studies, Ecocriticism and Modern Italy,” organized by John Welle. In my talk, “Kafka and Conversing Creatures in Italy: Interrogating the Human-Animal Boundary,” at the MLA panel I noted the strange gap in attention to Italian literary animals, especially when contrasted with Kafka’s central position in Animal Studies. I gave a talk on animals when I was in Rome, at the Norwegian Institute in June of 2014. In March 2019), I spoke at NeMLA, “From Franz Kafka to Pietro Grossi: What Italian Talking Animals Reveal about the Human Crisis” for the panel “Talking Animals in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature,” organized by Alessandra Mirra.

Kafka’s Italian Progeny, as many of my talks, discusses Morante, Svevo, Landolfi, and Buzzati. Some of the related work on Svevo has been published, as has a chapter on Morante, which includes discussion of Morante and animals.