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This dissertation examines the discourse and narratives formed around the Great East Kantō Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster (from 2011 to 2020 ca.), and reads them through the lens of environmental studies. Among the accounts of the catastrophe emerged in the wake of the events, many cluster around the trope of ‘recovery’ (fukkō) and focus on the representation of the most visible aspects and effects of the disaster, traceable to the earthquake and the tsunami. Through the analysis of a variety of sources, including political speeches, magazine articles, and especially literary works, this project demonstrates this emphasis on visibility to be part and parcel of a strategy of discursive and figural containment of radiation, and of other cognate elements perceived as undesirable and noxious (such as racial and sexual minorities). This rhetoric of containment intersects in turn with aspirations to recover the chronotope of the homogeneous, ethnically ‘pure’ and uncontaminated Japanese nation.In analyzing the echoes of such narratives across a diversity of recent literary works, I thus interrogate the semantic matrix upon which the category of ‘post-Fukushima literature’ has been established, and I attempt to propose an alternative taxonomy, organized around a mode of reading that I call ‘Radioactive Aesthetics.’ This approach to the text is sensitive to the qualities of radiation and to their potential to decenter and disrupt existent epistemic and visual regimes, and unsettles the influence that ‘recovery’, ‘visibility’ and ‘containment’ exert upon narratives of disaster. This project thus aims to (1) re-examine post-Fukushima literature in particular, and disaster literature as a whole, in light of its relationship to extant discourses of crisis; (2) enlarge the scope of these categories to include stories and histories whose imaginary trickles beyond the confines and chronologies of the nation-state; (3) and, finally, repopulate ‘human’ spaces of their animal, plant and mineral co-inhabitants.

IntroductionStereotactic arrhythmia radioablation (STAR) is a novel technique for the ablation of ventricular tachycardia in patients with contraindications to standard procedures, i.e., radiofrequency ablation.Case presentationWe report the case of a 73-year-old man with non-ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy and recurrent VT episodes. Electroanatomic mapping showed VT prevalently of epicardial origin, but direct epicardial access through subxyphoid puncture could not be performed due to pleuropericardial adhesions from a past history of chemical pleurodesis. STAR was performed, with no VT recurrence at 6 months follow-up.ConclusionsPrevious experiences with STAR have demonstrated its importance in the management of patients with refractory VT in whom other ablation strategies were not successful. Our case report highlights the use of STAR as a second choice in a patient with an unfavorable VT anatomical location and technical limitations to an optimal radiofrequency ablation. Moreover, it confirms STAR's effectiveness in the ablation of complex transmural lesions, which are more often associated with non-ischemic structural heart disease.

La fisica varroniana è stata sempre ritenuta di derivazione essenzialmente stoica. Un attento esame di alcuni passi del libro quinto del de lingua latina rivela, tuttavia, una non lieve influenza di teorie aristoteliche: dalle categorie di tempo e di moto alla spartizione del cosmo in Cielo e Terra, dall’esame dei quattro elementi costitutivi della realtà alla considerazione che il fuoco e l’acqua sono duplice causa del nascere; e ancora dalla continua trasformazione degli elementi alla rassegna di quanto si trova sulla terra (animali, piante, prodotti inanimati). Per quel che riguarda invece la biologia, Varrone non accoglie il cardiocentrismo comune ad Aristotele e agli Stoici, ma sembra aderire alle posizioni del filosofo pitagorico Filolao (ling. VII 17).