TY - JOUR
AU - Seger, Monica
AB - MONICA SEGER Narrating Dioxin: Laura Conti’s A Hare With The Face of a Child In his ambulatory reflections on Italy’s Po valley just after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, Gianni Celati writes: “il mondo esterno ha bisogno che lo osserviamo e raccontiamo, per avere esistenza” (126). The English translation of that statement is some- thing like the following: “the external world needs for us to observe and recount it, so that it may have existence.” I cite the original Italian for the particular verb used, raccontare, which can be translated as “to narrate,” or even “to tell the story of,” just as easily as “to recount.” Motivated by an ethical commitment to both place and people, Celati is an avid narrator of the lived world, what he calls the mondo esterno in the citation above. Through observation he bears witness to existence, thus acquiring a certain responsibility to the thing observed just as he confirms its truth. By then telling the story of that external world, by translating “knowing into telling,” as Hayden White once defined nar- rative, Celati ensures that others who might not have seen the thing observed may still also know it—thus translating knowing into 
TI - Narrating Dioxin: Laura Conti’s A Hare With The Face of a Child
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isw086
DA - 2017-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/narrating-dioxin-laura-conti-s-a-hare-with-the-face-of-a-child-7rER7KAtHt
SP - 47
EP - 65
VL - 24
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -