This seminar explores the discourses and representations of the environment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature. It charts the evolving relationships between the human, non-human, geological and climatic worlds in the period as they are (re)configured in contemporary French works. At the same time, it opens up a critical/creative space to explore how these texts are read and experienced in the twenty-first century.
Methodologically, the course broaches such approaches as deep ecology, environmental history, disaster studies, pastoralism, animal studies, ecofeminism, (post)colonial ecocriticism and the intersections between them.
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The structure of the seminar is broadly thematic, concentrating on pairs of texts across centuries to set up dialogues between them and their twenty-first-century readers. All primary texts are provided in both French and English.
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Topics
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Introduction to 18th-19th c. France – a foundational moment of the Anthropocene?
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Vagabondage: walking in the country and city in Rousseau, Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (1778) and Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres (1840)
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Alternative ecosystems: on ‘humanimals’ in Rétif de la Bretonne, La Découverte australe (1781) and Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864)
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Environment and Revolution: catastrophe, cycle or both? Sylvain Maréchal, Le Jugement dernier des rois (1793) and Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal (1826)
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Pastoralism and neo-animism: André Chénier, Bucoliques (c.1786-1794) and Paul Verlaine, Fêtes galantes (1869)
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Ecocolonial islands: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1788) and Louise Michel, L’Ère nouvelle, pensée dernière, souvenirs de Calédonie (1887)
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Ecotranslation: extracts from recent works by Mireille Gansel and Michael Cronin (both 2017)
General Reading List (in English and French)
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AUDIER, Serge, La Société écologique et ses ennemis, Paris, La Découverte, 2017
CLARK, Timothy, Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: CUP, 2011)
CRONIN, Michael, Eco-translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2016)
DESCOLA, Philippe, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
DUCHET, Michèle, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris: Flammarion, 1978)
FINCH-RACE, Daniel A. and Stephanie Posthumus (ed.), French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2017)
GANSEL, Mireille, Translation as Transhumance, trans. Ros Schwartz (New York: Feminist Press, 2017)
GARRARD, Greg, Ecocriticism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012)
GOODBODY, Axel and Kate Rigby (ed.), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
GROVE, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600-1860 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996)
HARAWAY, Donna, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
HEISE, Ursula K. et al (ed.), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (London: Routledge, 2017)
HITT, Christopher, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’, College Literature, 31:3 (2004), 123-147
HUET, Marie-Hélène, The Culture of Disaster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
LATOUR, Bruno, Cogitamus. Six lettres sur les humanités scientifiques (Paris: La Découverte, 2010)
LATOUR, Bruno, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991)
LOCHER, Fabien and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity’, Critical Enquiry, 38:3 (1 Mar 2012), 579-598
LYLE, Louise et David McCallam (ed.), Histoires de la Terre: Earth Sciences and French Culture 1740-1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008)
MCCALLAM, David, Volcanoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Essay in Environmental Humanities (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019)
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MERCHANT, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980)
MIGLIETTI, Sara, ‘Introduction: The Past and Present of Climate Theories’, MLN, 132:4 (2017), 902-911
MOSER, Walter, ‘The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects’, Arcadia, 38:2 (2003), 243-247
OPPERMANN, Serpil and Serenella Iovino (ed.), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017)
PLUMWOOD, Val, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993)
POSTHUMUS, Stephanie, French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017)
POSTHUMUS, Stephanie and Louisa Mackenzie (ed.), French Thinking about Animals (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2015)
RECLUS, Elisée, Du Sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes, Paris, Bartillat, 2019
RIGBY, Kate, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015)
SERRES, Michel, Le Contrat naturel (Paris: Flammarion, 1992)
THOMAS, Chantal and Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre (ed.) L’Invention de la catastrophe au 18e siècle: du châtiment divin au désastre naturel (Genève: Droz, 2008)
WESTPHAL, Bertrand (ed.), La Géocritique: mode d’emploi (Limoges: PULIM, 2000)
WOLFE, Cary (ed.), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
Some general electronic resources
Welcome to the Anthropocene
https://www.anthropocene.info/
Environmental History Resources
Environmental Humanities
https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities
The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
European Society for Environmental History
Bibliographical information about the primary texts and their relevant critical literature will be co-created with students.