Editors’ Introduction

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick, p. 37.

Frontiers of Ecocriticism II

Before it engages with the specifics of articles gathered here under the title “Frontiers of Ecocriticism,” this introduction to the second of two issues of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies/SITES devoted to this theme might fruitfully be conceived as an attempt to delineate the contours and evolution of the field, indeed to explore the very definition of what this field might be. In other words, while we are clearly interested in the practice of something called “ecocriticism,” we find that examining its formation, evolution, and frontiers yields results that are pertinent to a clearer understanding of the scholarly and creative work it has prompted.

Whether one thinks of ecocritical French and francophone Studies in North American universities or of literary studies in France and other francophone countries using a vocabulary of écocritique, écopoétique, zoopoétique, or écologie, French ecocriticism describes domains of inquiry that not only intersect but also frequently diverge from and challenge canonical anglophone formulations of ecocriticism. What is more, French ecocriticism remains highly decentralized; it is, paradoxically, a large field to which very few scholars feel they entirely belong and, for reasons we will explore in more detail below, affiliations and affinities tend to coalesce around the secondary terms or so-called subfields of ecocriticism. In this spirit, “frontiers of ecocriticism” is not a call for a research collective to move forward with a unified program of research, but rather an invitation to work from the various margins that we occupy, to reflect on and renegotiate the borders and blind spots of ecocritical thought as currently constituted, to creatively write in and about the environments that preoccupy us today.

The ambit of this double issue of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies/SITES is thus deliberately and pointedly broad: “contemporary” here refers not a period of artistic expression (e.g. French literature since the 1980s) but rather to a more neutral coevalness of scholarship, and we leave open the question of how the “contemporary,” the “French,” the “francophone” or the “ecocritical” might interact with or modify one another. Instead of a program or a theme, “frontiers of ecocriticism” provides a forum (in the increasingly illicit sense of an assembly “out of doors”) for challenging ecocritical readings along the edges of periods, aesthetic categories, and critical currents.

Mutations of Ecocriticism

The Arts and Humanities are currently experiencing a great proliferation of ecocritical inquiry and ecological thought spanning diverse media, languages, and theoretical orientations. It is not hard to understand why. On a global scale, climate change continues to multiply and exacerbate catastrophes, of which this year’s bitter crop includes, at the time of writing, scorching temperatures in the Arctic, massive wildfires on several continents, floods and hurricanes, and the unrelenting intensification of extinctive dynamics across all ecosystems. Entrenched and deep-cutting inequalities help determine the extent to which one is sheltered from the multifarious consequences of such events. Complete shelter is, however, inconceivable even for the most privileged, for even when we do not perceive ecological disaster directly and materially touching our bodies, its images nevertheless fill our screens and its imaginary reconfigures our sense of the forces that form, inform, and deform our living spaces and oikoi.¹ The extension of ecocriticism or ecologically adjacent fields of cultural inquiry is thus, as countless others have already observed, a natural response, so to speak, to concerns related to the state of the world, including its state in places that are not classically coded as nature or as privileged domains for environmentalist politics or aesthetics.

While the term “ecocriticism” is still widely used in Humanities scholarship, for many it harkens back to Anglophone scholarship of the latter decades of the twentieth century. In this period, ecocriticism was defined broadly as the study of how literature relates to the physical environment.² As Stephanie Posthumus notes (infra), this definition has the benefit of remaining open to a multiplicity of approaches and environments; it can potentially accommodate everything from avant-gardist aesthetics to old-fashioned realism or science writing, from utopias to dystopias, from wilderness to urban landscapes. In practice, however, first-stage ecocriticism often shows a marked preference for forms of nature writing and for the vocabulary of mid and late twentieth-century environmentalist activism. For these reasons, scholarship in the 1990s and especially the 2000s subjected ecocriticism’s core concepts—most crucially the dyads opposing culture and nature, human and non-human—to a salutary and necessary critique.³ While it was far from the first book to do so,⁴ Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, which argues for the need to go beyond nature as a “transcendental, unified, independent category” (13), offers a particularly influential and representative formulation of ecocritique. In that book, Morton defines ecocritique as “a dialectical form of criticism that bends back onto itself” and that is “permeated with considerations common to other areas in the humanities such as race, class, and gender, which it knows to be deeply intertwined with ecological issues” (13). The cultivation of these urgent political conjunctions is very much an ongoing project, particularly as concerns the articulation between ecological thought and critical race theory,⁵ but there can be little doubt that the intervening years have seen an explosion of scholarly and artistic production concerned with ecological issues in the broadest sense.⁶

As justifiable as it might be to historicize the field by speaking of an early ecocriticism which is revised and expanded by a variety of modes of ecocritique, in point of fact neither term enjoys anything like widespread acceptance. Scholarship using the language of ecocriticism or ecocritique is dwarfed, for example, by the immense outpouring of work on or against the Anthropocene, and what is described above as a moment of “ecocritique” in fact names a critical corpus that has generated an impressive array of new concepts and words. Morton’s discussion of ecocritique is, notably, just a stopover on the way to the eventual formulation of a profound ecological entanglement that he calls “dark ecology.” While there are some reasons to be skeptical of the current critical “neologism-cene” (Mentz 57),⁷ on the whole this process speaks to the vitality of ecological thought, which both accepts and demands creative thinking. Overly green and (m)anthropocentric ecocritical monocultures are being replaced by more diverse critical and aesthetic environments. Volumes such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s Veer Ecology,⁸ a compendium of essays on verbs that decenter the human and help us think the whirl and flux of the Anthropocene, and Brent Ryan Bellamy and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s An Ecotopian Lexicon,⁹ a compendium of essays on “loanwords” for conceptualizing and responding to the present ecological crisis, are merely the most explicit examples of a process of stylistic and conceptual invention that is widespread in ecocritical inquiry. As Anne Simon says of the language of zoopoetics, “pensée adjectivale ou pensée verbale, l’essentiel est de sortir de la pensée nominale quand elle rime avec pensée frontale” (“Du peuplement” 86).

As the conceptual frontiers and horizons of ecocritical research have expanded, as its language has evolved, the definitional coherence and utility of ecocriticism as both a label and field have been called into question. For example, Posthumus’ recent “état présent” in French Studies on ecocriticism, titled “Is Écocritique Still Possible?,” pointedly eschews the assertive and promotional mode favored by many such field-level overviews. This restraint is quite understandable, for ecocriticism is, arguably, less a field than a confederation of subfields, less a methodology implicating a set corpus than a web of disparate concerns that inflect diverse styles of reading, writing, and thinking. Field-level overviews of ecocriticism or ecocritique (which tend to be where these words are most often in use) clearly indicate that the parts are larger than the whole, that the so-called subfields have deeper histories and more extensive bibliographies than the containing concept that would unite them. This fact is illustrated by the table of contents of a book like Greg Garrard’s widely read Ecocriticism,¹⁰ which is divided into chapters on pollution, on positions (which include utopianism, environmentalism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, eco-Marxism, and Heideggerian ecophilosophy), on the pastoral tradition, on wilderness, on apocalypse, on dwelling, on animals, and on possible futures. The obvious dissymmetry between the green sapling of ecocriticism and the old bristlecone pines of utopianism or apocalyptic thought indicates how a too-tight focus on ecocriticism as a field is bound to disappoint. The adjective “ecocritical” is for this reason more apposite than the noun “ecocriticism,” for what ecocriticism purportedly contains is in fact a set of distinct areas of research which are bound by common ecocritical concerns or which are increasingly inflected by ecocritical vocabularies, concepts, or modes of reading.¹¹

Ecocriticism is not a method; it is instead closer to a principle of non-organization, a coexistence which coheres due to a recognition of the dynamic interconnectedness of concerns, but which also assumes a healthy measure of disharmony and agonism. Indeed, in recent years a number of ecocritical thinkers have emphasized the importance of not consolidating or defining ecocriticism or ecological thought in any kind of narrow methodological terms. Posthumus affirms that the plurality of subjects and approaches now implicated in ecocriticism, its lack of a “single defined research area,” speaks to the strength of the field and to its potential for “adaptation and survival” (“Is Écocritique” 598). Mentz has put out a call to “pluralize the Anthropocene!” and wants to cultivate a field that is “dynamic and disorderly” (2). Simon is likewise skeptical of how methodologies calcify into formulae, and asserts that if literary scholars inherit toolkits, they must always be adapted to present concerns. In Simon’s apt formulation, “ce qui fait la non-essence de l’écologie littéraire, c’est le fait que tout est en production, déflation, entrelacs, enchevêtrement, mouvement, cycle de la vie et de la mort, transformation…” (Hollister et al. infra). In this manner, “frontiers of ecocriticism” names a horizon or edge of existing scholarship, a place of alchemical experimentation with new perspectives, styles, subjects, and modes of critical thought.

Ecocriticism or Écocritique?

In keeping with this journal’s status as a bilingual forum for French and Francophone Studies based in the United States, the essays in this issue are all, in various manners, characterized by an extrinsic or at least transnational perspective. The frontiers evoked in this issue’s title point, in this sense, to the various kinds of distance—theoretical, aesthetic, linguistic, social, cultural, temporal—which ecocritical thought must notice, negotiate, resist or cultivate. Such differences and distances allow for perspectival relativization and offer, as Simon puts it (Hollister et al. infra), “décentrement, dialogue et nourriture.” Crucially, we might observe that the distinction outlined above between ecocriticism and ecocritique risks disappearing altogether upon translation into French as écocritique. If we are to avoid imposing an (English) definition of a transnational field—“French ecocriticism” or “ecocritical French studies”—that erases a multiplicity of differences, we must therefore attend to how France, like other countries outside what we might call the Anglosphere, has developed distinct traditions of ecocritical thought specific to local linguistic, cultural, and ecological concerns. A scholar of contemporary French literature housed in a North American university and a scholar of contemporary French literature working in France or Belgium may share a field, but the intellectual and material environments in which they relate to that field differ considerably, notably due to the institutional structures of power that determine the relative legibility and legitimation of their subjects and approaches.

In her incisive and timely study of “French écocritique,”¹² Posthumus argues that Luc Ferry’s Le Nouvel Ordre écologique,¹³ a work representative of the prominence of “a French humanist way of thinking” in the philosophical establishment, had chilling effect on hexagonal French ecocritical literary studies and environmental philosophy in the 1990s (French 4). While it is hard to measure in more than anecdotal terms the power of what Posthumus calls the “Ferry effect” (3), it is clear that in the 1990s and early 2000s—a time when anglophone ecocriticism was well-established and had considerable momentum—there is a real paucity of work in France that uses the language of écocritique or écopoétique. As Alain Romestaing, Pierre Schoentjes and Simon note of Anglophone ecocriticism in their “avant-propos” to a 2015 issue of Fixxion on the subject of “Écopoétiques”:

L’inscription de cette discipline au sein des études culturelles, la perspective souvent axiologique des analyses et un rapport à la nature historiquement différent ont freiné son développement en France, où se sont plutôt développées des approches prolongeant un intérêt ancien pour le paysage et la géographie. (3)¹⁴

Conditions have changed considerably since the late 2000s and the past decade in particular has seen a boom in ecocritical study in France and Belgium similar in sweep, though naturally different in style and subject, to what one finds in anglophone literary studies.¹⁵ (The “Ferry effect” of the 1990s was not, in other words, followed by a “Bruckner effect” in the 2010s.)¹⁶ Without discounting the potential for institutional de-legitimation to cultivate insularity and zones of willful non-engagement, we should be wary of reading this timeline as one that would simply situate French thought as a late-comer now playing catch-up with its Anglophone cousins. To do so would dichotomize ecocriticism along national and linguistic lines and minimize the foundational roles that French thinkers and writers have played and continue to play across the varied and resolutely transnational histories of the entangled subfields loosely associated under banners ranging from ecocriticism to écopoétique to the environmental humanities. Rather than assert the dominance of a term or a theoretical paradigm, this issue itself aims to mark differences and commonalities, and presents an informal survey of the variety of ecological approaches that characterize work in and around French and Francophone Studies.

Meeting Places and Points of Contact

As this issue progressed from an open-ended invitation for reflection on the frontiers of ecocriticism to a set of short creative or scholarly texts, a number of shared concerns, problems, and affinities have emerged which link these essays in ways both overt and subtle. Perhaps most fundamentally, a number of essays here are concerned with an ecocritical revision of literary canons. Annabel L. Kim, notably, attacks existing categories of canonicity head-on, arguing that “ecocriticism must end the canon” (infra). In all cases, however, this breaking of canonicity is a question of opening space for new fruitful critical environments. As Simon reminds us, canon is a deeply ambivalent word:

Qaneh en hébreu, qui a donné le mot « canon », désigne une canne utilisée comme unité de mesure : un canon littéraire est souvent un instrument induisant des mesures prescriptives qui témoignent d’une idéologie sur ce qu’est ou non la « bonne » littérature. Le terme hébreu renvoie cependant aussi au roseau et au jonc: un usage plus souple du mot, soucieux des évolutions de l’histoire, permet d’envisager comment un canon renouvelé peut contribuer à la constitution d’un nouvel espace symbolique commun, à partir duquel inventer de nouvelles façons d’aborder les oeuvres, et de rendre la recherche politiquement agissante. (Hollister et al. infra)

Taking up this project of creating new canons, Pierre Schoentjes’s essay, which places the very recent fictions of Emmanuelle Pagano in dialogue with the early twentieth-century fiction of Marie Gevers, ably demonstrates how ecopoetic attention to the “lieux générateurs des récits”—in this case humble and often overlooked étangs—allows us to escape presentist literary-critical paradigms. While alert to the numerous differences between these writers, Schoentjes associates them through an attention to their shared project for environmental narrative:

Avoir la main sur la nature n’est certainement pas l’ambition de ceux qui oeuvrent aujourd’hui pour la préservation de l’environnement, mais ils peuvent espérer qu’en ayant la main sur les récits, ils infléchiront l’imaginaire pour que ne disparaissent plus ni les étangs ni les vignes, ni aucun des espaces et des êtres moins emblématiques que les montagnes, les baleines ou les séquoias.

Schoentjes’ conclusion echoes in many ways that of Ari Blatt, for whom the fight against “plant blindness,” the venture outward into the woods, is a way of cultivating new sympathies, of looking at both trees and books differently. Gina Stamm’s essay on Jean Giono and René Char makes a case for the ways in which early and mid-twentieth-century French writers enable us to imagine an expanded corpus for what has been called “nature writing.” Intriguingly, Stamm’s conclusion reveals fissures in the wall between nature writing and posthumanism, emphasizing how Ponge and Char, “while working in an idiom that had not yet evolved the vocabulary of the posthuman, work toward this non-hierarchical way of thinking.” This critical revision could also be read as extending to the short fiction that Antoine Volodine has generously contributed to this issue, titled “Les Visages de terre,” which, in a distant echo of the delirious ending of his novel Le Nom des singes,¹⁷ imagines the survival of an unusual post-exotic “humanist” community.

In keeping with the idea of ecology as a way of deconstructing violent hierarchies and divisions—“the thinking of things on a number of different scales, none of which has priority over the other” (Morton, Dark Ecology 22)—a number of essays here emphasize how ecocritical thinking works against existing borders and boundaries. In her essay on literature as an “excremental exercise” (infra), Kim sums this position up neatly when she argues that “a truly ecologically grounded ecocriticism is one that will reject the very notion of frontier and subvert hierarchy by seeing how interdependent we are” (infra). In his discussion of the famous zone à défendre (ZAD) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Joshua Armstrong likewise reads this cultural space as an effort to produce a “coherent counter-cultural aesthetic” (infra) in opposition to the logics of sovereignty, territory, and frontier that characterize globalized capitalism. Reading across a diverse corpus of canonical and contemporary artists and theorists, Valérie Loichot argues for the richness of ecological aesthetics in small countries, particularly island countries, where closeness to the earth is not equated with closed territorial logics: “parallèlement à la situation linguistique s’étend un ordre politique mondial où la frontière n’est plus barrière entre espaces nationaux mais lieu de passage” (infra). Leaving solid land behind, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev’s essay on seawater underlines the importance of attending to depth rather than surface:

It is the addition of depth to considerations of vastness that recasts the oceanic as seawater. Surface-level views of the pelagic emphasize connections and borderings, walls and surveillance. They reflect the temporalities and mind frames of empire, capitalism, and colonialist intentionality.

Approaching such divisions from another angle, Selim Rauer’s reading of Wajdi Mouawad’s Anima (2012) surveys the ultraviolent environments created by “[la] volonté de domination et d’exploitation du vivant comme ressource” (infra). As different as these essays are from one another in approach and subject, they share a vision of ecocriticism or ecological aesthetics as tools for breaking down rigid frontiers and violent hierarchies.

In her discussion of zoopoetics, Simon notes that the initial impetus for her pioneering work in this domain was the desire to write about animals “en les sortant des analyses allégoriques, symboliques ou psychanalytiques dont je me délecte souvent mais qui ne doivent pas être hégémoniques sur le sujet animal” (Hollister et al. infra). As Jacques Derrida once cautioned in an essay on the subject of nuclear war, we must be wary of the urge “to translate the unknown into a known, to metaphorize, allegorize, domesticate the terror, to circumvent (with the help of circumlocutions: turns of phrase, tropes and strophes) the inescapable catastrophe, the undeviating precipitation toward a remainderless cataclysm” (21). The negotiation between the material and the conceptual, and more specifically the question of how ecocriticism should work through or against metaphor and metaphorical thinking is touched on by a number of contributors. Christy Wampole, a scholar with a longstanding interest in the ramifications of metaphors, tackles this subject frontally, arguing that “it is time for the development of a systematic and expansive ecocritical metaphorology, that is, a science of the metaphorization of the planet, its processes, and the involvement of humans in those processes in the Anthropocene” (infra). Talbayev’s essay, which proposes an “ontology of dissolution premised on loss and decomposition that blurs of the discrete categories of subject and object into an enmeshed form of intimacy,” also shows a particular concern for how to “think through seawater as substance rather than metaphor.”

In all of these cases, however, the aim is less a wholesale rejection of metaphor or, more fundamentally, of abstract, figural, or conceptual language as such than it is an effort to differentiate the useful from the oppressive in our aesthetic practices and forms of critical attention. In this manner, Morgane Cadieu’s analysis of how grass functions as a “‘matterphorical’ middle” in Patrick Modiano’s fiction draws on diversity of critics who “inject materiality in their metaphors.” Emphasizing the grassy borderlands between things, Cadieu describes how Modiano prefers similes (“a figure of speech that relies on a conjunction between two terms”) to metaphors, and situates himself as a writer of and from the middle. Echoes of such concerns reverberate through Gaëtane Lamarche-Vadel’s essay on Iranian gardens, which attends to how spirituality and poetry operate as “une intelligence des transferts, des traductions, des interpénétrations permanentes des phénomènes cosmiques, terrestres, humains.” Noting how ecological catastrophe proceeds from the severing of connections and the separation of elements, Lamarche-Vadel advocates for a poetics of transmutation, “une connaissance qui s’enrichit et s’approfondit en épousant tous les passages de la matière.”

Metaphors speak too to modes of resistant ecocritical writing. While remaining attentive to the violent ambivalence of the places and things he describes, Keith Walker’s tour of francophone “ecosystems of desire” (infra) involves, notably, an amplification of natural metaphors: islands of coral, traversing the boundaries between animal life and geology, “metaphoriz[e] an aspirational geology of desire” (infra); volcanoes, which in Aimé Césaire’s poetry become “anthropomorphic revolutionary forces and speech acts” (infra), metaphorize “a vehement desire emerging from a lack, a sociopolitical need, a psychological emptiness” (infra). Distant echoes of these poetics reverberate in the novelist Yasmina Khadra’s discussion of the desert, where he writes of wanting to let the desert speak: “ce n’est pas bien d’enfermer le désert dans le silence parce que ça fait de nous des espèces de déités; alors, j’ai voulu qu’il parle, et quand le désert parle, il me renvoie à mon humanité, à ma fragilité, à mon insignifiance” (Tsobgny infra).

In her 2016 essay titled “What is the Anthropo-Political,” Claire Colebrook writes of the indifference of contemporary crises: “I am going to suggest that […] we do not isolate the ecological crisis from a series of other crises, including the financial crisis, the war on terror, the new modes of terror (including bioterrorism) and the specter of mass viral pandemic” (119). “Frontiers of Ecocriticism,” a collective project conceptualized in 2019 and which contains articles largely composed during the spring and summer of 2020, is marked by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and hence registers the moment where that specter has become cruelly real. Viral pandemics, though to date not a primary preoccupation of ecocriticism, count among the multifarious effects of globalization that ecocritical study has tasked itself with engaging. As Donna J. Haraway reminds us, “the Anthropocene obtained purchase in popular and scientific discourse in the context of ubiquitous urgent efforts to find ways of talking about, theorizing, modeling, and managing a Big Thing called Globalization” (49). Attending to this political condition, George MacLeod’s essay on Robin Aubert’s Québécois zombie film Les Affamés (2017), though primarily a reflection on rural blight and trauma, analyzes how a genre about contagion might be brought out of the mall and into the rural and agricultural environments which are often on the front lines of economic and ecological crises. MacLeod’s essay also points to the difficulty of escaping the aestheticization and spectacular pleasures of violence: “[Les Affamés] suggests that future viral and environmental catastrophe will take place in broad daylight, and that we may very well consume the spectacle of our own destruction with a ravenous, zombie-like appetite” (infra). This conception of ecological disaster as culminating in a kind of apocalyptic zombification is likewise discussed by Boualem Sansal, who, in his interview with Brigitte Tsobgny, affirms that his novel 2084 is a dream of a dead earth where “il n’y a plus que des zombies commandés par d’autres zombies” (Tsobgny infra).

Stepping back from the apocalyptic frame, Kari Weil reflects on the current pandemic by emphasizing ecological interconnectedness: “The pandemic […] emphasizes a truth about isolation that has been central to the tenets of ecocriticism: that we humans are never completely separate from others, whether human or non-human, nor can we completely isolate ourselves from the environments in which we live—however toxic or contagious they may be” (infra). Echoing Blatt’s concern for sympathetic noticing and Talbayev’s privileging of “intimate familiarity” over detached reflection or knowledge production, Weil explores the tension between “bodily contagion” and “bodily sympathy” (infra), between dangerous contact and healing touch.

Several of the concluding essays in this issue are concerned with critterly contacts with animals and insects. In each case, however, these subjects are approached in very different manners. In Jean-Christophe Bailly’s philosophical essay inspired by an encounter with a lizard, he attends to how this other “forme de pensivité,” though accessible only by means of imaginative reconstruction, helps us to think about what is gone and what is left of the living. As Bailly concludes: “à l’heure où le film du vivant s’appauvrit continûment et fait l’objet de coupes qui en rendent le scénario illisible, il importe de se concentrer sur des séquences intactes et, si possible, de les réverbérer.” Shifting to a poetic mystical register, yasser elhariry reads across from the Qurʾān to Lautréamont to Mallarmé to Salah Stétié and, in the process, traces the outlines of an “arachnotopian” poetics, a language of “primal scenes of fear in caves and tuffets,” an inner idiom infiltrated by spiders and “skimming old cobwebs.” Volodine’s fiction, “Les Visages de terre,” could also have been titled “arachnotopia,” and like elharary’s essay it ends with a reflection on extinction and survival: “Il faut attendre le décès (de l’humanité) pour survivre (en araignées).” As Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza suggests in her article on ecospirituality, Antoine Volodine’s fiction allows us to see how a poetics of opacity and intangibility can trouble the neo-colonial ontologies and subjectivities that underpin many narratives of the Anthropocene.

The closing essays in this double issue also all reflect, in different ways, on encounters in confinement and on the poetics that emerge from different kinds of voluntary and involuntary confinement. Christian Doumet’s “Notes sur le ciel bleu par temps de confinement” zooms out to explore how confinement turns our attention back toward the sky, reminding us of the pre-linguistic initiation that we underwent when we first learned to see the sky: “Cet apprentissage d’étendues sans limite, de matières impalpables, de toute lumière et de toute nuance fut sans doute l’épreuve de connaissance la plus complexe et la plus décisive de toutes, puisqu’elle contenait toutes les autres en puissance.” Pushing back against the view of the sky as part of a managed anthropocentric environment, Doumet reemphasizes the experience of the illimité: “Dans un monde où […] les hommes s’instituent les propriétaires-exploitants de maplanète, fût-ce pour en préserver écologiquement le bien foncier, nulle oeuvre n’est à espérer qui les aide à vivre leur relation à l’illimité”

The conditions in which we are currently living, the ways that our personal and professional lives have been disrupted in the past year, and the demands that both immediate and attenuated crises are placing on our attention have made this a particularly difficult time to produce work. If we might be permitted what is perhaps a slight step across a stylistic and tonal boundary, it seems appropriate to conclude by expressing our gratitude to all of the authors who have written for this double issue. Their commitment bespeaks the urgency and intensity of the subjects that they are thinking through in this time of upheaval and uncertainty.

Lucas Hollister, Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin
Guest Co-Editor Editors

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

Roger Célestin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin

Eliane DalMolin is Professor of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

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.

Notes

1 We borrow this turn of phrase from Jean-Christophe Bailly, who in sketching “l’instantané mobile” of the pays (14) speaks of the necessity “de sonder ce qui l’a formé, informé, déformé” (10). On ecological disaster as a wide-reaching imaginary for contemporary Western cultures, see for example E. Ann Kaplan (Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. Rutgers UP, 2015, pp. 2–12); Timothy Clark (Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 139–140); Claire Colebrook, “Time That Is Intolerant” (Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, edited by Sebastian Groes, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, pp. 147–158 [pp. 150–151]); Heather Davis and Étienne Turpin (“Art and Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment and the Sixth Extinction,” Art in the Anthropocene, edited by Heather Davis and Étienne Turpin, Open Humanities P, 2015, pp. 3–29 [p.3]).

2 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 (p. xviii).

3 As justifiable as this critical revision might have been, a close examination of early ecocritical scholarship often reveals it to be less naïve than some recent scholarship would lead us to believe. For example, while Glotfelty maintains a distinction between nature and culture, human and non-human, she strongly emphasizes their ecological interconnectedness (xix). She also notes the need to attend to how place is interconnected with questions of race, class and gender (xix).

4 Just a year after the publication of Harold Fromm and Cheryll Glotfelty’s The Ecocriticism Reader, Timothy Luke’s book Écocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (U of Minnesota P, 1997) proposes a rereading of the terms and rhetoric of ecocritical discourse.

5 Compared to the abundance of scholarship attentive to class (particularly but not exclusively eco-Marxist scholarship) and gender (eco-feminisms), race is relatively undertheorized in a field which has been largely dominated by white academics. While scholars in postcolonial studies have long attended to environmental issues and ecological interconnectedness, the past decade has seen these concerns brought to the fore in a number of books in both English and French. Recently, publications like Malcolm Ferdinand’s Une écologie décoloniale (Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen, Paris, Seuil, 2019), Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (U of Minnesota P, 2019), and the contributions to the 2019 special issue of Critical Philosophy of Race on “Race and the Anthropocene” edited by Nancy Tuana and Robert Bernasconi have highlighted how essential minority artistic voices and critical race theory are to ongoing efforts to imagine a just ecological and aesthetic environment. Environmental and ecological perspectives in history and political theory are also spotlighting the importance of (post-)colonial oikoi. See for example Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism (Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, Cambridge UP, 2010, translated into French in 2013) and Pierre Charbonnier’s Abondance et Liberté (Abondance et liberté. Une histoire environnementale des idées politiques, Paris, La Découverte, 2020).

6 Morton’s language is, for example, echoed very closely in the description of Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder, and Astrida Neimanis’ book (forthcoming at the time of writing) Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive (Open Humanities P). There, the authors speak of the need to “hack” the anthropocentric assumptions inherent in the discourse of the Anthropocene, and to attend in particular to “entanglements of race, sexuality, gender, coloniality, class, and species in all of our earthly terraformings.”

7 Steve Mentz’s list of such neologisms includes the Agnotocene, Anglocene, Anthrobscene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Econocene, Homogenocene, Jolyonocene, Manthropocene, Misanthropocene, Naufragocene, Necrocene, Phagocene, Phronocene, Plantationocene, Planthropocene, Polemocene, Sustainocene, Symbiocene, Thalassocene, Thanatocene, Technocene, Thermocene, Trumpocene (57–64). New terms expand conceptual horizons and reorient thinking away from anthropocentric ecocritical concepts, but they are also clearly used to claim territory, and specialized vocabulary and neologisms can intentionally or unintentionally mark spaces as inhospitable to the uninitiated. As Ursula K. Heise reminds us, “The emphasis on growth, expansion, and increased diversity can take on overtones of disciplinary turf war and triumphalism as easily as of deepened knowledge.”

8 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, editors, Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, U of Minnesota P, 2017.

9 Brent Ryan Bellamy and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, editors, An Ecotopian Lexicon, U of Minnesota P, 2019.

10 Ecocriticism, 2^nd Edition. Routledge, 2012.

11 In many instances, rather than transforming fields by introducing new concepts, ecocritical lenses allow us to notice useful formulations of environmentality in existing critical and literary corpora. On how ecopoetic approaches are reconfiguring the French literary canon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, see Romestaing et al. p. 3 as well as the articles infra by Kim, Schoentjes, Stamm.

12 Posthumus uses écocritique in English to emphasize “the cultural specificity of French textual ecologies and the ways in which they extend beyond their linguistic and cultural boundaries” (French 3).

13 Le Nouvel Ordre écologique: L’arbre, l’animal et l’homme, Paris, Grasset, 1992.

14 For a more extensive discussion of “l’écopoétique européenne” which argues for the need to distinguish this current from American ecocriticism, see Schoentjes’ Ce qui a lieu (Ce qui a lieu: Essai d’écopoétique. Wildproject, 2015) and Schoentjes’ article infra.

15 For a more detailed overview of this subject, see Posthumus’ “Is Écocritique Still Possible?” See also the conversation between Simon and Posthumus (infra), which provides both anecdotal and field-level insights about the progressive legitimation and extension of these modes of inquiry in France.

16 Here we are referring to Pascal Bruckner’s Le Fanatisme de l’apocalypse (Le Fanatisme de l’apocalypse: Sauver la terre, punir l’homme, Paris, Grasset, 2011), a polemical essay that in many ways echoes Ferry’s work in argument and aim.

17 Paris, Minuit, 1994.