(2021). Editors’ Introduction. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 25, Frontiers of Ecocriticism II, pp. 137-152.

Abstract Expanding on his work in ecopoetics begun in Ce qui a lieu (Marseille, Wildproject, 2015) and culminating in his study Littérature et Écologie (Paris, José Corti, 2021), Pierre Schoentjes undertakes a comparative reading of Marie Gevers’ “L’Étang” (first published in 1950) and of Emmanuelle Pagano’s La Trilogie des rives (2019, Prix du roman d’écologie 2018 for the second volume, Sauf riverains)

Abstract Although it has never constituted itself as a genre within the French sphere, within the cannon of twentieth-century "Literature" are many texts that share the characteristics traditionally associated with “nature writing” (first person observational prose infused with a consciousness of natural history), including those of Francis Ponge and René Char. While ecocriticism has expanded to examine

Abstract Trees, among the world’s oldest creatures, seem to be having a moment. Not only have researchers made fascinating discoveries about their “secret lives,” these ubiquitous superorganisms have sparked the culture’s imagination as well. Trees have recently been the subject of best-selling novels, essays, and high-impact films. While most human beings would be hard pressed to name any species

Abstract This article is an attempt at deciphering the enigmatic title of Patrick Modiano’s 2012 novel: why did he choose to call it L’Herbe des nuits, despite the book’s apparent lack of engagement with plants? In Jardins de papier, Evelyne Bloch-Dano understands the references to nature in the rest of Modiano’s œuvre as metaphors for the author’s poetics of memory and childhood. I want to argue that

Abstract This article explores the place of gardens in a more general ecological cartography. Focusing on the long tradition of Iranian gardens whose origins go back to Gilgamesh, the article proposes that these gardens owe their longevity to a successful interaction between the environmental and the mental, between the physical and the psychic, the material and the immaterial, and weaves the network

Abstract This essay probes the methodological contours of an (eco)critical practice centered on seawater as an analytical category. It queries how a focus on seawater as substance implicates the human and the geophysical in a bilateral process of mutual alteration and eventual amalgamation. I propose a “trans-material” ontology articulated around the corrosive power of seawater, through which organic

(2021). À partir d’un lézard. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 25, Frontiers of Ecocriticism II, pp. 218-224.

Abstract Referring to Senancour’s Oberman, Hölderlin’s Hyperion and Carl David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Mists, this paper attempts to figure out the romantic approach to sky and clouds as cultural, artistic, and philosophical symbols. Considered as an unlimited space, the sky is an endless matter of meditation regarding human finitude. In several European countries, the recent experience

Abstract Antoine Volodine’s idiosyncratic “post-exotic” fiction has been remarked for its singular cyclical temporality and its post-apocalyptical aesthetics. In this essay, I explore the ecocritical implications of Volodine’s nonlinear time—as it disrupts the underlying assumption of progress, and its inherently binary organization of life, that sustain our current ecological crisis. Drawing from

Abstract Arachnid and insectile lifeforms form an apocalyptic literary cluster linking early Islam, Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Salah Stétié. This essay begins by reimagining dialogues and interpersonal affections between the prophet Muḥammad and his close friend Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, who were granted safe passage through the mountains of Mecca by a spider. The story highlights the central role

Abstract About Maria Schnittke, an imaginary post-exotic writer, and her novel “Les Visages de Terre,” which depicts spiders as the last hope for humanism.

(2021). Editorial Assistants and Acknowledgments. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 25, Frontiers of Ecocriticism II, pp. 254-254.

(2021). Editors’ Introduction. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 25, Frontiers of Ecocriticism I, pp. 1-15.

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

(2021). Entretiens avec Boualem Sansal et Yasmina Khadra. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 25, Frontiers of Ecocriticism I, pp. 42-51.

Abstract The field of French and Francophone studies should lead the way in the development of an ecocritical metaphorology, that is, a science of the metaphors used to describe human involvement in environmental change in the Anthropocene. Using the analytical skills typically applied to the study of literary texts, scholars in French and Francophone studies should analyze the environmental metaphors

Abstract This essay demonstrates how petits pays, particularly small tropical islands assaulted by human-triggered climate change, are also at the forefront of an aesthetics and ethics of solidary vulnerability. Paradoxically, I argue, their smallness allows them to connect effectively with large planetary events, in a movement Édouard Glissant calls Mondialité, since they can function away from the

Abstract This article considers, primarily through the lens of literature, the legacy of environmental issues from colonialism through the contemporary period, including attention to Louisiana, France, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Morocco and Vietnam.

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

Abstract The international airport is the quintessence of globalized free-market capitalism: there, the conquering of distances, fluid circulation of people and goods, advertising and consumption of products, all come together in a continuous globalized spatial network covering the earth. It is the epitome of the built, contained, climatized, homogenized, and controlled environment: at antipodes, then

Abstract Robin Aubert’s 2017 film Les Affamés is a zombie genre film, set in an unspecified region of rural Quebec. The first Quebecois addition of note to the zombie film genre, Les Affamés follows the few remaining humans who have avoided contamination from their infected, flesh-eating pursuers. The rustic setting provides a haunting backdrop as the protagonist, a bearded science-fiction devotee

Abstract Can justice be guaranteed at the cost of trespassing the realm of law? This is a question asked by Jacques Derrida in his essay, Force of Law scrutinizing the notion of “divine violence” as stated by Walter Benjamin in his essay Critique of Violence. It is precisely to a literary experience investigating the concepts of violence and justice that the Francophone writer Wajdi Mouawad (1968)

Abstract Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Austrian physician, Anton Mesmer, posited the existence of a universal fluid that surrounds, penetrates, and connects all bodies, much like the interplanetary forces of attraction and repulsion. The correct flow of this fluid, he believed, was responsible for both physical and psychic health and he developed his practice of animal magnetism as

(2021). Editorial Assistants and Acknowledgments. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 25, Frontiers of Ecocriticism I, pp. 136-136.

(2020). Editors’ Introduction. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 24, Open Issue, pp. 517-522.

(2020). Entretien avec Nassira Belloula : Trajectoire, engagements et écriture. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 24, Open Issue, pp. 523-528.

Abstract I, Caustic [Moi, l’aigre], published in 1970, may very well be Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s literary masterpiece. Not only is it his most vitriolic condemnation of colonization and political repression, it is also his most daring literary experiment, composed of multiple literary genres that Khaïr-Eddine strove to master and innovate throughout his literary career. Equal parts fiction, memoir,

(2020). “Igifu”. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 24, Open Issue, pp. 548-554.

Abstract After my Study Abroad program in Paris was cancelled due to COVID-19, I decided to travel to France in a different way: through a virtual literary lens. For several weeks throughout the summer of 2020, I scoured hundreds of Instagram accounts and scrolled through numerous online French literary magazines—Recours au poème, 17secondes, Revue la piscine, Levure littéraire, and Les Tas de mots—in

Abstract Through an examination of the paradoxical case of André Gide—who is at once a towering intellectual figure and, for scholars ranging from Paul de Man and Roland Barthes to Emily Apter and Michael Lucey, a “missing” writer—this article proposes a broad reflection on French modernism as a “missing” aesthetic-political concept. Specifically, it shows how different conceptions of Gide’s relation

Abstract This article seeks to draw attention to the work of Brice Parain, an under-examined figure in mid-twentieth-century French philosophy. It considers Parain's most influential work, Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (1942), through the lens of his contemporaries: the critical essays of Sartre and Camus, and the film representations of Godard and Rohmer. Parain's focus on the

Abstract The challenge of what we understand by hypermodern is that the concept does not fit in any French literary movement or school of thought. Is it that the hypermodern novel transmutes with each contemporary author? This article discusses how Houellebecq is one novelist who has adopted ideology as a shorthand for questioning the state of contemporary French society. Yet critical reality is far

Abstract Rather than grant readers the catharsis of identifying culprits, Georges Simenon’s denouements frequently leave them unsure of which characters to condemn. While scholars often note this lingering uncertainty, they have yet to explain how Simenon generates it or how it contributes to readers’ enjoyment. I contend that Simenon exploits anchoring—people’s tendency to weigh initial information

Abstract Destiny, the final book of acclaimed French author Pierrette Fleutiaux, is a plight for the migrants cause and an invitation to the return of the value of hospitality. Step by step, the eponymous protagonist’s fragmented journey is unveiled, taking on monomythic qualities: her exile from Nigeria, her perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, the traffickers’ lies, the forced prostitution

Abstract The Islamic revolution of 1979 and its developments have been the major reasons for the mass migration of Iranian intellectuals to the West and the main topic of the Iranian diaspora’s literary texts. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially in France, a new generation of Iranian women novelists has created a shift in traditional post-revolutionary memoir writing by

Abstract In his autobiographical work, Deux garçons, Philippe Mezescaze relates his love story with Hervé Guibert—a love conceived during adolescence. During a theater class given in the Cultural Center of La Rochelle, their passion reveals itself to their classmates and professor during a powerful performance of a scene from Camus's Caligula. Their performance is profoundly shocking to the audience

Abstract Mixing the methods of machine learning and those of French cultural studies, this article explores recent trends in French politics. We analyze a large data set from Twitter (over a hundred and fifty million tweets) in order to reveal notable currents in discourse around the Gilets Jaunes and the French presidency (with particular focus on Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen). This article delineates

Abstract This article proposes to explore a part of Gionian poetry that is still little known. From the point of view of ecocriticism, it unfolds from the hypothesis according to which concerns relating to degrowth and "deconsumption" emerge in Gionian narratives. By verifying this postulate which combines economic aspects, sociological factors and ecological questions, by calling to the rescue the

Abstract A taste for lands far from Metropolitan France marks Jean Rolin’s writing. He indulges that taste in Savannah (2015), an account of a trip he took to that American city in remembrance of a previous trip in the company of his friend, the photographer Kate Barry. An elegiac tone echoes throughout the book, for between those two trips, Kate Barry died. As Rolin charts his new itinerary, the films

Abstract Concepts such as Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects and Rob Nixon’s slow violence assert the epistemological difficulties involved in assessing current environmental problems along with the affective potential of art to “rouse public sentiment” (Nixon 3) and create an “affective experience that would existentially and politically bind them [people] to hyperobjects, to care for them” (Morton 184)

(2020). Editorial Assistants and Acknowledgments. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Vol. 24, Open Issue, pp. 660-660.

Abstract In July 2004, under the aegis of UNESCO, the ship La Boudeuse set off to visit eight societies located between South America, the Pacific Ocean, Asia, and Africa. The project led to the creation of a new series by the Éditions du Seuil: “Peuples de l’eau,” where the works of the writers that participated in the journey were published, i.e., Raga by J. M. G. Le Clézio and La Terre magnétique

Abstract The narrative model of Le Clézio’s Alma exemplifies what Rosanne Kennedy calls “multidirectional eco-memory.” In the novel, memories of slavery and indenture in Mauritius appear alongside the imagined life of the long-extinct dodo. This multispecies scope of memory, implicitly giving birds and humans the same ontological status, is one aspiration of the novel. That said, such ambitious remembering

Abstract Considering the theme of catastrophe in the works of Philippe Vasset entails encountering a paradox: almost all of his texts gravitate around various disasters affecting the contemporary world (from global warming to armed conflicts), and yet the author does not theorize this fact, nor do his texts contain an explicit denunciation of these catastrophes (with only one exception). This article

Abstract After the 2015 terror attacks in France, historian Pascal Ory explained that although “terrorism” and “earthquakes” share a common etymology and seem to shock societies in similar ways, they are essentially opposite—the former is absolutely intentional, while the latter is purely accidental. Yet, an Algerian novel from 2005 invites us to rethink this dialectic: in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te

Abstract In his internationally renowned Ambiguous Adventure, the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane recounts the Europeans’ “unruly art of conquest” in causing a “civilizing disaster.” How were the Diallobé people to survive the French occupation? Paradoxically, it was by sending their children to their school so that they could learn about that “unruly art.” Due to the autobiographical nature

Abstract Jean-Yves Jouannais examines the history of war in L’Encyclopédie des guerres, a performance piece at the Centre Pompidou, which is ongoing since 2008. Compiling citations on the theme of war while also interrogating the possibilities of literary form, the work stages itself being composed session by session and year after year. Proposing itself as a “fiasco,” the work initially insisted on

Abstract Representations of the hostile, uninhabitable, and threatening land haunt all of the novels of Marguerite Duras' Indochina cycle. The literal and symbolic importance of natural disasters is already noticeable in The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique), the first novel of the cycle. This article argues that the diegetic space in The Sea Wall is inscribed on a land where various forces

Abstract A tenant sets himself on fire in Sophie Calle’s childhood bed, which is tossed out and left in her building’s courtyard. A spiteful colleague assaults Calle with a stiletto, bringing her career as a stripteaseuse to an abrupt end. From divorce to self-immolation to strangulation to suicide, Des histoires vraies (2017), Calle’s ongoing compilation of autobiographical vignettes, is steeped in

Abstract Le Rivage des Syrtes, a 1952 novel by Julien Gracq, narrates the trajectory of Orsenna, a fictional Western empire, toward its obliteration. This article analyzes the decadence that gives birth to the “dernière volonté [last will]” that initiates a path to obliteration. The empire’s decadence is unveiled as the state in which difference has become impossible, reflecting Orsenna’s ecocidal

Abstract In Féerie pour une autre fois II (also titled Normance), Céline recounts the chaos engendered by the Allied bombing of Paris in April 1944, which killed 1,800 people in seven days. The novel, published in 1954, was a commercial flop. Among the reasons could be a narration that almost completely disappeared, or a traditional chronology that literally imploded. The writing seems subject to delirium

Abstract In tracking his slow recovery from the facial injuries that he sustained in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Philippe Lançon develops two distinct and conflicting senses of the word “fiction:” on the one hand, fiction as the imagination, construction, and organization of a possible world; on the other, fiction as the irruption of the unimaginable and the unreal in the midst of everyday life. In

Abstract This paper argues that the work of Antoine Volodine and his heteronyms (Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann) interrogates genre and convention in an uncompromising way that moves significantly beyond the generic interrogation conducted by most contemporary writers. It suggests that one productive way to think about his work is to think about it not in terms of traditional genres at all, but through

C’est un immense plaisir, et un tr es grand honneur, d’avoir et e invit ee par les organisateurs de ce beau colloque, consacr e cette ann ee aux ecritures de la catastrophe, a ouvrir cette s eance pl eni ere sur Le Lambeau, de Philippe Lançon, et d’aborder a travers ce livre la question plus vaste des rapports entre litt erature et soin. A sa sortie au printemps 2018, Le Lambeau – fait rarissime –

Abstract In the French Canadian author Sylvain Trudel’s works, mysterious powers are devising ways to destruct the world. Some characters nevertheless resist the idea of an anticipated disaster: they protect themselves from the eschatological threat, and it seems at some point possible to avoid the end. Does it mean that the eschatology is here only a partial apocalypse and that the dreaded death might

Abstract This article involves identifying what Blanchot calls “désastre” in L’Écriture du désastre (1980). The fragments that make up this collection reveal four meanings that can be unfolded according to this logical order: 1) “désastre” recalls the passage “from the closed world to the infinite universe” (A. Koyré) driven by modern astronomy and philosophy against a humanity that believed itself

Abstract My paper shows how Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s work goes against the grain of a literary mainstream whose most prominent authors (and literary prizes) favor autofiction or narratives re-exploring a more or less recent historical past. Instead, Vanderhaeghe’s radical writing seeks to challenge the formal potentialities of literature, thus inscribing his work in the experimental traditions of Oulipo

Abstract This talk presents a comprehensive overview of the principal stylistic, aesthetic, and political aspects of the polyphonic and collective writings of four of the most visible authors of Post-Exoticism.

Giraudoux wrote La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu at a time when the catastrophe that was World War I was still fresh in humanity’s memory. “La grande guerre” or “la der des der,” was supposed to be the last, but it was soon followed by yet another war that would be no less murderous. As we write these lines in April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused the death of so many worldwide, plunging