A Diorama of Human History: Visions of the Anthropocene in Giuseppe Genna’s Discorso fatto agli uomini dalla specie impermanente dei cammelli polari (2010)

This article examines the ways in which the Anthropocene concept is visible in recent Italian narrative fiction, namely in Giuseppe Genna’s Discorso fatto agli uomini dalla specie impermanente dei cammelli polari (Discourse Given to Humankind by the Impermanent Species of Polar Camels, 2010). In this text, the extinct species of the polar camel holds up a mirror to humans and reminds them of the human transience. I show how the author not only combines allusions to palaeogeological deep time or deep future (in which everything will have ‘dissolved’) with references to some of the great modern authors like Giacomo Leopardi, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, but also presents an (auto)fictional story of a writer who realizes that he shall become a new kind of poeta vates.