This presentation explores more than textual research outputs as a means of communication to share a geographical investigation of Venice’s literary nightscapes. Specifically, this exploration focuses on the geo-literary investigation of elements involved in the co-production process of dystopian Venice’s nightscapes identified in La seconda mezzanotte (2011), a work of climate fiction by the Italian writer Antonio Scurati. The geo-literary analysis of the text builds its theoretical framework upon geohumanities traditions and, in particular, draws on recent studies that suggest “research on climate fiction can benefit from thinking beyond a certain text’s or film’s embedded ideology or its role as a change agent, and perhaps more in terms of a dialectic between ideology and agency” (Schlosser, 2022). To make this dialectic explicit, lenses and tools borrowed from night studies and tourism studies underpin the analysis of a selection of themes and tropes that draw connections between dystopian literary nightscapes and contemporary Venice’s nightscapes. Accordingly, realising a story map as a form of more than textual research output appears to be a method for fostering further meaningful reflection through data reorganisation while also conveying in a digital form the interpretive potential of nightscape as a critical concept.

Giuseppe Tomasella
University of Padova, Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World – DiSSGeA, Padua, Italy

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ID Abstract: 68