Abstract

Literature is an important part of French national identity and cultural patrimony, as seen in the hype around the literary rentrée each year and the prestige economy that continues to mark French literature with its prize system. However, French literature, particularly those works that are canonical or on track to being canonized, is full of excrement. I examine this literature's excrementality to argue that the shit in this valued literature allows us to think literature not in canonical terms but in ecological ones. Shit serves as the ground for conceptualizing what kind of material literature is; it is the material by which canonical texts break down the very idea of the canon that would contain them, thereby returning culture to its early, non-industrial, agricultural roots, where culture and cultivation converge as a material, human encounter with the environment marked by a cycle of exchange and reciprocity. Despite the seeming health of an elitist and canon-driven model of literary production, these works’ scatological quality acts at cross purposes with the canon to allow the shit-culture it contains to circulate and return to an environment where it can be mobilized to enrich and produce new forms of culture.

摘要

文学是法国民族认同和文化遗产的重要组成部分，正如对文学租金的大肆宣传所表明的那样。每年，还有以其奖励制度继续为法国文学留下深刻印象的威望经济。但是，法国文学，尤其是那些规范或有望被规范的作品，充满了排泄物。我考察了这本文学作品的残酷性，认为这种珍贵的文学作品使我们不能用规范的术语来思考文学，而可以用生态学的术语来思考文学。狗屎是概念化什么样的物质文学的基础。规范的文本正是通过这种材料来分解包含该规范的正典观念，从而使文化回到其早期的非工业农业根基，在那里文化和耕作融合为一种物质的，人类的，与环境相遇的遭遇。交流和互惠的循环。