ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES AND TASSO’S GERUSALEMME LIBERATA.

Torquato Tasso’s romance epic poem, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), offers a fundamental contribution to current debates in environmental humanities. In this work, Tasso disrupts customary divides between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, male and female. Nonhuman organisms appear as sentient, display agency, communicate through signs, and participate in the creative process. Tasso maps out the back-and-forth transit routes between human beings and other natural entities, thus representing an excellent example of what Stacy Alaimo calls “transcorporeality”, that is, “the human-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from “nature” or “environment”. He recalls Ovidian myths that address hybridity and transformation in order to explore the interrelations of human corporeality, and in particular the female body, with the rest of the ecosystem. Special attention in the poem is devoted to the ways in which women’s bodies relate to trees. Erminia writes on trees; Clorinda’s simulacrum is assimilated within a cypress; the supposed spirit of Armida lies both inside and outside of a myrtle-walnut surrounded by signs of poetry. Tasso himself, whose family name signifies “yew tree”, embodies multiple dichotomies, representing a man-yew who explores poetic authorship through women-trees. In my close reading, I provide original interpretations and explore theoretical arguments pertinent to Tasso’s epic, such as Karen Barad and Jane Bennett on matter’s agency, Stacy Alaimo on transcorporeality, Donna Haraway’s notion of natureculture, Timo Maran’s work on ecosemiotics, and Serenella Iovino’s and Serpil Oppermann’s reflections on storied matter. My goal is to show the relevance of Tasso for new materialism and ecocriticism, and how more work is needed on the importance of early modern Italian writers for current discussions on environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]