Écocide et déshumanisation: pour une lecture écocritique des « miracles relatifs » de Nancy Huston

Abstract

Ecological threats are one of the major worries of our times. Human beings are becoming aware of their responsibility for the destruction of the world which surrounds them. The interest in these questions of the environment and ecology is widely present within contemporary fiction. Interrogations on the relationships people have with planet earth arise in it continuously and move progressively from an anthropocentric vision to an ecocentric perception of the literary object. This is the case of the French-Canadian author Nancy Huston. In her novel, Le Club des miracles relatifs (2016), she depicts a dehumanised world and a slaughtered nature in a sort of ecologic dystopia, in which she denounces the exploitation of the deposits of bituminous sands in Canada, and presents us annihilated human beings, who have destroyed their own planet. In this article, I aim at presenting an ecocritical approach on the novel, with the purpose of analysing the narrative techniques used on the representation of the ties between humans and the planet they live on. Furthermore, I will look into the relationships between environmental consciousness and literary aesthetics, as well as into the connection between existential crises and the contemporary ecologic calamities.

Keywords:

• Literature
• ecology
• human
• earth
• ecocide
• dehumanisation

Notes

1 Les espaces en blanc correspondent à la version originale.

2 Voir Kate Averis, “Eco-ficciones americanas : crisis embiental y social en La novia oscura (1999) de Laura Restrepo y Le club des miracles relatifs (2016) de Nancy Huston,” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, vol. 45, 2019, pp. 105–102 [p. 111].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Márcia Seabra Neves

Márcia Liliana Seabra Neves has a Ph.D. in Culture, from the University of Aveiro. Between 2012 and 2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow and a member of the “Institute of Literary Studies and Tradition,” at the New University of Lisbon. Here she developed a research project under the theme “Zoofictions: figures of animality in contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian narratives.” Since February 2019, she has been a hired researcher at the same University, where she also teaches Francophone Literature. Her current research focuses on the theme “Zoofictions and geopoetics: cartographies of animality.” She has published several works in the scope of figuration of animality in literature.