Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander, a conversation between author Maria Anna Mariani and Franco Baldasso, 2019 Fellow in Modern Italian Studies.

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy’s status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling—and in many ways passive—accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney’s dictum that "there is no such thing as innocent by-standing," the conversation about the book frames Italy’s fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction.

Maria Anna Mariani is associate professor of modern Italian literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age (2022), winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; Primo Levi e Anna Frank (Carocci 2018); and Sull’autobiografia contemporanea (Carocci 2012).

Franco Baldasso is assistant professor and director of the Italian program at Bard College. He codirects the Graduate Summer School “Cultural Heritage and Memory of Totalitarianism” at Sapienza University in Rome. He is the author of Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy (2022), winner of the Marraro Prize for Italian History. Among his other publications: Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Pendragon, 2007); Curzio Malaparte, la letteratura crudele. Kaputt, La pelle e la caduta della civiltà europea (Carocci, 2019).