Thesis title: Underground Landscapes. Subterranean Imaginaries through Environmental Humanities
This thesis reconceptualizes landscape by turning toward the subterranean. Challenging the surface-centric legacy of landscape thinking, it establishes the often overlooked underground as a perceptible, affective, and ecologically dynamic terrain. Drawing on a post-disciplinary methodology that bridges literary analysis, art, and environmental humanities, the project interrogates how underground spaces have been imagined, sensed, and materially transformed. From Dante’s infernal geomorphologies, Novalis’ mining sensibility and Jules Verne’s speculative geologies to sacred caves and sacrifice zones, the work traces a dense cultural archive of katabatic journeys, including one with Parisian cataphiles. Through the lens of material feminism and transcorporeality, it foregrounds the agency of subterranean matter as co-constitutive actors in shaping narrative and caving bodies. The result is an expanded framework for landscape that embraces the underground as a layered and vital zone of entanglement. This work ultimately advocates for an ethics of descent, calling for more attentive and imaginative engagements with the hidden grounds beneath our feet.