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Abstract
These conversations highlight the ways in which Stéphanie Posthumus and Anne Simon, who work in different academic fields but often look at similar literary texts written in French, envision ecocriticism and zoopoetics. Drawing on their research of the last twenty years, they discuss intersections and differences of these two approaches within their respective geographical contexts, North American and European (and more specifically French). They locate ecocriticism and zoopoetics in the complex and plural histories of their emergence and development while also making comparisons with similar fields such as geopoetics and environmental humanities. They foreground key objectives such as decentering the human and grounding language in the body, advocating for subjects deemed “unsuitable,” bringing together literature, ecologies and animal space-time, examining their objects of study from the perspective of the text’s individual stylistic innovations, reconfiguring literary canons and literary histories, and inventing new narratives and explorations around terms such as oikos, machines, arche…) Examining notions like identity, limits and interstices, they underscore the political and ethical dimensions of ecocritical or zoopoetic literature. Finally, they affirm the ever-changing frontiers and constantly evolving perspectives of their two fields.
Notes
1 “De la vie dans la vie: sur une étrange opposition entre zôê et bios.” Labyrinthe, vol. 22, no. 3, 2005. http://journals.openedition.org/labyrinthe/1033 ; DOI : 10.4000/labyrinthe.1033.
2 “L’Animal et le dieu: deux modèles pour l’homme. Remarques pouvant servir à comprendre l’invention de l’animal.” L’Animal dans l’Antiquité, edited by Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey, Vrin, 1997, pp. 157–180.
3 Voir Isabelle Stengers, Résister au désastre, Wildproject, 2019, et Virginie Maris, La Part sauvage du monde. Penser la nature dans l’Anthropocène, Paris, Seuil, 2018.
4 Voir Baptiste Lanaspeze, “L’Écologie fait des récits” (interview with Christine Marcandier and Jean-Christophe Cavallin). Diacritik, March 2019. https://diacritik.com/2019/03/19/baptiste-lanaspeze-wildproject-lecologie-fait-des-recits/.
5 Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, Paris, La Découverte, 2017.
6 Je développe cette question dans Proust ou le réel retrouvé. Le sensible et son expression dans À la recherche du temps perdu ([2000] Paris, Champion, 2018).
7 I will not delve into the differences between écocritique and these other eco- and geo- approaches here since I have already done so elsewhere. But I do want to point out, as Anne does a little later with respect to zoopoétique, that these approaches may intersect but do not encompass each other: géocritique brings together geography, travel writing and post-colonial perspectives whereas géopoétique emerges from Kenneth White’s philosophy and creative engagements with place. As for écopoétique, its meaning has evolved quite a bit within the French intellectual sphere: from a more interdisciplinary definition of various artistic forms of “making with environment” (Nathalie Blanc, Denis Chartier and Thomas Pughe, “Littérature et écologie: vers une écopoétique,” Écologie & Politique, no. 36, 2008, pp. 15–28) to a more strictly literary understanding of genre, style, and poetics (Pierre Schoentjes, Ce qui a lieu: Essai d’écopoétique, Wildproject, 2015).
8 See Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. xv–xxxvii.
9 See Lucas Hollister, “The Green and the Black: Ecological Awareness and the Darkness of Noir,” PMLA, vol. 134, no. 5, October 2019, pp. 1012–1027.
10 In my 2003 doctoral thesis, La Nature et l’écologie chez Lévi-Strauss, Tournier, Serres, I walk carefully through the influence of structuralist thought on the éco-pensée of these three thinkers central to twentieth-century French thought. In (a much too brief) response to your question about intellectual heritages, there has clearly been different approaches to decentring the human, but they have not always been paired with an ecological emphasis on interrelatedness, interdependency, and habitat.
11 Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, Duke UP, 2016.
12 Serenella Iovino and Serpel Opperman, editors, Material Ecocriticism, Indiana UP, 2014.
13 French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically, U of Toronto P, 2017.
14 Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse, Paris, La Découverte, 2019.
15 L’Éco-pouvoir: Environnements et politique, Paris, La Découverte, 1994.
16 See Bruno Latour’s Où atterrir?
17 See Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel, nouvelle édition, Paris, Flammarion, 2020, Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard UP, 2004, and Isabelle Stengers Cosmopolitiques I. La Guerre des sciences. L’Invention de la mécanique: pouvoir et raison. Thermodynamique: la réalité physique en crise, Paris, La Découverte, 2003.
18 Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry, Lexington Books, 2014.
19 “Is Écocritique Still Possible?” French Studies, vol. 73, no. 4, October 2019, pp. 598–616. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knz232.
20 Louisa Mackenzie and Stephanie Postumus, editors, French Thinking About Animals, Michigan State UP, 2015.
21 Le Silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité, Paris, Seuil, 1998.
25 Voir Anne-Rachel Hermetet and Stephanie Posthumus, editors, “Ecological In(ter)ventions in the Francophone World,” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 10, no. 2, 2019.
26 Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Ecology, and the Environment, U of Virginia P, 2003.
27 The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America, Oxford UP, 2003.
28 Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody, George B. Handley and Stephanie Posthumus, Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis, Bloomsbury, 2019.
29 Pour un développement, je me permets de renvoyer à mon article “De la légitimation d’un corpus zoopoétique à l’établissement d’un canon” (in Batailles autour du canon, edited by Guillaume Bridet, Éditions universitaires de Dijon, forthcoming 2022).
30 Projets en cours de dépôt Man/Animal/Machine Liminalities, porté par Cristina Álvares, et Hunting fictions : hunting as motif and metaphor in Portuguese literature, porté par Márcia Neves.
31 McClelland and Stewart, 2003.
32 See Ursula Heise, “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities.” ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline, 2015, https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/comparative-literature-and-environmental-humanities, “Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism,” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 3, May 2013, pp. 636–643, and Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Oxford UP, 2008.
33 Habiter, Paris, Le Pommier, 2011, p. 53.
34 See Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Manifeste Assi, Montréal, Mémoire d’encrier, 2014 and Audrée Wilhelmy, Blanc Résine, Montréal, Leméac, 2019.
35 Paris, P.O.L., 2017.
36 Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding, Inaction and Opportunity, Cambridge UP, 2009.
37 Voir Anne Simon, “La Vermine dans les plis de nos villes” (“Réenchanter le sauvage urbain,” Université Via Domitia, Perpignan, June 14 2019. https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/3051).
38 I am not dismissing the violence that has been done by maintaining nationalist literary traditions, but rather am hoping for new spaces of inquiry within the university that are organized around concepts and research questions. For a more in-depth engagement with the violence of national literary traditions, see Audrey Lasserre’s article “Qu’est-ce qu’une histoire de la littérature française ?” (La France des écrivains: Éclats d’un mythe (1945–2005), edited by Marie-Odile André, Marc Dambre and Michel P. Schmitt, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2011, pp. 207–217) and the more recent critique of literary nationalism in Alexandre Gefen, Oana Panaïté and Cornelia Ruhe’s Avant-propos to the 2019 Fixxion issue on “Fictions ‘françaises’” (Fixxion: Revue Critique de Fixxion Française Contemporaine. No. 19, 2019, http://www.revue-critique-de-fixxion-francaise-contemporaine.org/rcffc/article/view/fx%2019.01).
39 For an example of a short story I have recently published, see “Thus—Imagining Alternative Futures with Cancer” (Alienocene. Journal of the First Outernational, March 1 2019, https://alienocene.com/2019/03/01/thus-imagining-alternative-futures-with-cancer/).
40 Stephanie Posthumus and Stéfan Sinclair, “L’inscription de la nature et de la technologie dans La Possibilité d’une île de Michel Houellebecq,” Sites: Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, vol. 15, issue 3, 2011, pp. 349–356.
41 U of Minnesota P, 2019.
42 The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Harvard UP, 1995.
43 See Atwood, Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis, Guild American Books, 1989, N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky (Orbit, 2015, 2016, 2017), Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice, Orbit Books, 2013, Naomi Alderman, The Power, Viking, 2016, and Lauren Beukes, Zoo City, Angry Robot, 2010.
44 See Julianna Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, U of California P, 2005, Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace, 1968, José Saramago, The Lives of Things, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, Verso, 2012, and Renato Rosaldo, The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Duke UP, 2013.
45 Voir Christine Détrez et Anne Simon, À leur corps défendant: Les femmes à l’épreuve du nouvel ordre moral, Paris, Seuil, 2006.
46 “Noms d’oiseaux,” En attendant Nadeau, Hors-série n° 3 (“Bêtises”), edited by Pascal Engel, summer 2018, pp. 14–18, https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/2018/07/17/noms-oiseaux-betise/.
47 Voir le diaporama sonore “Hybrides humains/animaux éphémères dans le street art” (Marion Dupuis, with the help of Simon Garrette, Véronique Lorin et Ann-Koulmig Renault, in Animots: Carnet de Zoopoétique, 2019, https://animots.hypotheses.org/10115) et “Mots/Animaux : randonnée en bibliothèque avec Anne Simon” (EHESS_Podcasts, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/user-897145586/motsanimaux-randonnee-en-bibliotheque-avec-anne-simon).
48 See my 2019 article “Is Écocritique Still Possible?” See also the recent call for papers for an issue of Fabula-LhT on “Littérature(s) pour des temps extrêmes” that advocates for an “écologie littéraire qui prendrait pour objet les interactions entre théorie littéraire, production des textes et souci du terrestre” (Jean-Christophe Cavallin and Alain Romestaing, Fabula-LhT, January 16 2020, https://www.fabula.org/actualites/fabula-lht-nouveaux-enjeux-de-l-ecopoetique-contemporaine-vers-une-ecologie-litteraire_94500.php).
49 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, U of Chicago P, 2016.
50 Random House, 2010.
51 HarperCollins, 2004.
52 See Baqué, Iegor Gran, L’Écologie en bas de chez moi, Paris, P.O.L., 2011, Philippe Vasset, Journal intime d’une prédatrice, Paris, Fayard, 2010, and Augustin Guilbert-Billetdoux, La Messie du peuple chauve, Paris, Gallimard, 2012.
53 Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, U of Minnesota P, 2018.
54 Open Humanities P, 2014.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lucas Hollister
Lucas Hollister is Associate Professor of French and Italian Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019) and of a number of articles on modern and contemporary French literature. His current research focuses primarily on ecocriticism and genre fiction in France and the United States.
Stephanie Posthumus
Stephanie Posthumus is Professor of comparative literature at McGill University, and she has been developing an ecocritical approach to the many diverse forms of the non-human in contemporary literature and philosophy. She is the author of French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically (2017) and co-editor of the essay collection French Thinking about Animals (2015) and French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century (2017). She is currently researching the circulation of plants in contemporary literature written in French (for more information, see https://imaginairebotanique.uqam.ca/).
Anne Simon
Anne Simon is Research Director at the CNRS and affiliated faculty at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where she oversees the Pôle Proust and the zoopoetics research program “Animots.” She has codirected special issues of Esprit créateur (2011), Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (2012), Fixxion (2015), and Revue des Sciences humaines (2017) on Animal Studies and Ecopoetics. She is the author of four books on Proust, of an essay on gender (with Christine Détrez), and of an essay on zoopoetics (Une bête entre les lignes, Wildproject, 2021).