Loving the Alien: Ecofeminism, Animals, and Anna Maria Ortese's Poetics of Otherness.

In this essay, I analyze how literary imagination can be used as a tool for theoretically exploring the notions of otherness, vulnerability, and human/nonhuman relationships in the framework of feminist ecocriticism. In particular, I examine how a precise literary genre, namely, magical realism, can function as a diffracting lens to make the hybridizations and the overlapping of human, nonhuman, and gendered bodies, visible through narrative strategies that facilitate our affective response. Building my theoretical discourse mostly on feminist animal studies, material ecocriticism, and posthumanism, I consider the work of the Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998). In scrutinizing and her "creaturely poetics of otherness," as exemplified in particular by her novel "The Iguana," my reading also involves comparative considerations on Ortese's relationships with the non-Italian authors that inspired her vision.