Testare i meccanismi del paesaggio: percorsi letterari tra versi, immagini ed ecologia

In this issue of Moderna Michael Jakob and Clelia Martignoni share a similar, geographically oriented and literary structured goal: Jakob tries to understand how landscape makes both an emotional and a physical claim on us, and how we are to respond. Relying on geocritical and geopolitical bibliography Martignoni examines the work of famous Italian 20th century poets in order to discover how geographical images or metaphors in poetry are not simply ways of mirroring the world, but essential elements for understanding landscape in its double role of cultural construction and figure within which we find or lose ourselves. This introduction illustrates the theoretical context in which both scholars operate, locating the origin and the historical and iconic stages of development for a full-fledged geo-centred aesthetic; it also suggests that geocriticism not only absorbs all forms of perception and consciousness in its visual paradigm, but also dictates the symbolic rules through which we nowadays, consciously or unconsciously, interact with the world around us.