![]() This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in Toxic Immanence: Nuclear Legacies, Futures, and the Place of Twenty-First Century Nuclear Environmental Humanities, edited by Livia Monnet and Peter van Wyck, from McGill-Queen's University Press. I will demonstrate how these encounters transform protagonists, especially Elena who finally rediscover the woman’s identity and female genealogy, and how they manage to find a new life in the ruins of their small world. I argue that mutual relationships between protagonists and the community are examples of “unpredictable encounters”, which “contaminate” people and bring about new forms of collaboration since it is the only way to survive in a global state of precarity. This “assemblage” is based on diversity: the community unites people of different ages, sexes, and nationalities. In particular, I will focus on the interactions between protagonists and the local community, whose members try to find a new way to live on a damaged planet, making worlds between humans, the environment, and non-humans. ![]() Therefore, I will read the text through the lens of Tsing’s thought, but I will also use the framework of feminist ecocriticism. ![]() The main female protagonist, Elena, is translating Anna Tsing’s book “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (2015), which becomes a clue to interpret the novel. Trapped in the rural areas between Lazio and Umbria, the protagonists (Elena, Ettore, and their two children) have to deal with the end of the world on a small scale. In Rome, heavy incessant rainfall causes floods, so that the Italian capital is almost destroyed by the natural disaster. In the text, an adultery drama and a conflict between motherhood and womanhood unfold in the scenario of eco-catastrophe in the Anthropocene, and the writer swings between reality and dystopia. In my paper, I analyze Chiara Mezzalama’s novel “Dopo la pioggia” (2021), which can be classified as a climate fiction book. ![]() Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Virtual Conference “EmergencE/Y”, July 26-August 6, 2021.
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