CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

2021, VOL. 25, NO. 1, 16–41

https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2021.1865051

INTERVIEW

Conversation questions for Professors Anne

Simon and Stephanie Posthumus
Lucas Hollister, Stephanie Posthumus and Anne Simon

ABSTRACT
These conversations highlight the ways in which St
ephanie 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 dif-
ferences of these two approaches within their respective geographical con-
texts, North American and European (and more specifically French). They
locate ecocriticism and zoopoetics in the complex and plural histories of their
emergence and development while also making comparisons with similar
fields such as geopoetics and environmental humanities. They foreground
key objectives such as decentering the human and grounding language in
the body, advocating for subjects deemed “unsuitable,” bringing together lit-
erature, ecologies and animal space-time, examining their objects of study
from the perspective of the text’s individual stylistic innovations, reconfigur-
ing literary canons and literary histories, and inventing new narratives and
explorations around terms such as oikos, machines, arche … ) Examining
notions like identity, limits and interstices, they underscore the political and
ethical dimensions of ecocritical or zoopoetic literature. Finally, they affirm
the ever-changing frontiers and constantly evolving perspectives of their
two fields.

KEYWORDS Zoopo

etique; zoopoetics; animots;
ecocritique;
eco-pens
ee; oikos/habitat

1. Definitions and terminology

As scholars working, respectively, in the domains of
ecocritique and zoo-
po
etique, perhaps you could begin by quickly reminding readers how you
define these terms. This might also be a place to discuss other prevalent
labels and concepts related to these areas of inquiry (e.g. Animal Studies,
Plant Studies, Critical Climate Studies, the environmental humanities, the
Anthropocene, Nature writing) or to discuss how you see your field(s)
interacting with theoretical currents both new and old (e.g. structuralist
or poststructuralist poetics, biopolitics, Marxisms, feminisms and
queer studies).

ß 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 17

Comment d
efinissez-vous l’
ecocritique et la zoopo
etique ? Quelles

th
eories/m
ethodologies utilisez-vous dans votre recherche ?
Anne Simon: Je d
efinirais la zoopo
etique comme l’attachement (avec tout
ce que le terme contient de passion, de tendresse et de n
ecessit
e) aux
entrelacs entre les po
etiques signifiantes des humains (
ecritures, danse,
corps perform
es, gestuelles quotidiennes, paroles souffl
ees, etc.), les allures
expressives des animaux (dont les corps et les traces nous racontent des
bouts d’histoires vitales) et les
el
ements, pour reprendre un beau et vieux
terme, du temps o u l’on croyait a l’^ame du monde et que les b^etes
parlaient … J’arrive d’ailleurs de moins en moins a dissocier ces trois
pans, puisque nous, humains, sommes des animaux, que nous sommes
investis par d’autres animaux, que nous ne nous pensons et ne vivons
jamais hors-sol ou en apn
ee. Plus j’avance, moins j’arrive a d
efinir ce mot
que j’ai emprunt
e a Derrida dans L’Animal que donc je suis.
On peut peut-^etre revenir sur les
etymologies grecques z^oon et poiein
du terme « zoopo
etique » pour commencer. Tout d
epend comment on
d
efinit ces termes en grec. On relie souvent poiein a « cr
eer » et « fabri-
quer » (des poemes, entre autres) ; l’
etendre a un agir voire a une
agentivit
e (pour parler l’idiome post-moderne qui n’est pas le mien une
fois dans cet entretien !) est une extension sans doute anachronique, mais
si cet anachronisme est affirm
e et assum
e, il peut ^etre utile. Concernant
les termes z^oon, z^o^e et bios, Laurent Dubreuil a dans un article passion-
nant1 montr
e a quel point leurs sens, oscillant entre vie singuliere et qual-
ifi
ee, et vie en g
en
eral, n’
etaient fix
es ni a un instant T, ni sur la longue
dur
ee de leurs emplois en Grece ancienne. Francis Wolff2 avait pour sa
part insist
e sur le fait que le z^oon ne d
esigne ni l’animal, ni le vivant,
mais le mouvement (y compris des astres et des d
emons, donc exit les
plantes pendant quelques siecles !) ; il proposait donc de le traduire par «
l’anim
e », terme fascinant en français. Je pars de ces mises au point his-
toriques, et je me mets ensuite a « d
elirer », comme dirait Deleuze, sur la
motion, l’
emotion, l’animation (^ame, animal, anim
e forment un r
eseau
magnifique), le souffle …
J’ai beaucoup de difficult
e, et cela ne me pose d’ailleurs pas probleme,
a me retrouver dans la liste des champs de recherche que vous listez entre
parentheses « (Animal Studies, Plant Studies, Critical Climate Studies, the
environmental humanities, the Anthropocene) », et m^eme a me situer par
rapport a eux. Ces cat
egories ne me parlent, ne me traversent pas, parce
que leurs pr
esuppos
es ne rendent pas compte de ce que j’essaie de faire,
ou que leur aura s
emantique me semble restrictive. Elles sont
evidemment
extr^emement utiles a un niveau collectif et pragmatique, elles peuvent
avoir une efficace a la fois acad
emique et politique, et c’est sur ce plan
tres positif : je me situe souvent, dans mes profils et rattachements
18 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

institutionnels, en humanit
es environnementales ou, si possible, en

humanit
es
ecologiques. Mais a titre personnel, j’essaie justement
d’inventer un langage qui court apres les vivants, apres les mondes anim
es
devrais-je presque dire : un langage qui se contente, en s’en enchantant
ou en s’en effrayant, de les suivre (encore Derrida !), et qui ne veut sur-
tout pas faire entrer ma pens
ee dans des classements que je tente juste-
ment de d
econstruire ou, sans vergogne aucune, de contourner. Pour
vous donner un exemple, je fais ici allusion au pr
esuppos
e qu’il faudrait
aujourd’hui des Animal Studies distinctes des Plant Studies ou de leur
rapport aux
etudes sur le climat et la « nature » (notion que je me refuse
d’ailleurs, a l’instar d’Isabelle Stengers et de Virginie Maris,3 a faire dis-
para^ıtre, comme le souhaitent certains sp
ecialistes de sciences sociales
sous pr
etexte qu’elle est historiquement construite et variable culturelle-
ment). Or, je travaille sur l’enchev^etrement des vivants entre eux et sur
leur imbrication avec un oïkos qui ne les « contient » pas mais est quasi
s
ecr
et
e par eux : un oïkos qui – air, pierres, chemins, eaux vives, marais,
friches, interstices urbains, min
eraux, plafond de mon appartement ou
dessous d’une
ecorce – vit avec les vivants, en eux, par eux … La pierre
n’est pas dissociable des insectes qui germinent et vivent sous elle, vous
ou moi des bact
eries qui nous investissent. Le terme « Anthropocene » de
m^eme ne m’a jamais parl
e : comme le dit a juste titre Baptiste
Lanaspeze,4 l’
editeur pionnier de la maison d’
edition Wildproject, ce
terme est encore une façon de ramener l’incommensurable atemporalit
e
de la Terre a la petite et certes d
esastreuse mesure chronologique de l’hu-
main. Il reste que ce mot et ses rivaux (Capitalocene, Plantationocene,
Chtulucene, Pyrocene … ) ont permis une prise de conscience du grand
public sur l’impact des activit
es humaines moins sur la planete que sur
cette « zone critique » chere a Bruno Latour, qui tente de nous reterres-
trialiser avec pr
ecision dans O u atterrir ?5 Je n’emploie pas non plus
« environnement », qui fait encore « tourner » en rond le monde autour
de nous, je pr
efere assumer le mot «
ecologie » et son oïkos souvent
malmen
e : d’o u l’importance de la biopolitique dans mon travail, sur
laquelle je reviendrai. On verra avec la question de l’
ecof
eminisme que
l’
ecopo
etique et la zoopo
etique permettent de sortir de d
ebats et d’opposi-
tions qui ont eu leur raison d’^etre historique mais qui sont devenus des
freins pour d
ecrire la recherche et le monde de la vie actuels. Pour vous
donner un autre exemple, li
e a votre question sur la m
ethodologie, je n’ai
jamais souscris a l’autot
elisme des ann
ees 1970, cette id
ee que la
litt
erature ne parle que d’elle-m^eme et ne parle qu’aux humains, qui fai-
sait des ravages quand j’
etais
etudiante ou doctorante ; toute ma these sur
le monde sensible chez Proust a
et
e au contraire de dire que la litt
erature
procure « la joie du r
eel retrouv
e » (Proust 4576), un r
eel entrelac
ee a
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 19

l’affect, a l’onirique, au corps, aux b^etes ou au paysage. Je me sers en

revanche des magnifiques outils laiss
es par le structuralisme et le formal-
isme … pour conjoindre la vie et le langage cr
eateur ! Bref, il convient
selon moi moins d’« utiliser » des m
ethodes (car grand est le risque de
virer au proc
ed
e ou a la recette toute faite qui tue le jaillissement subver-
sif de la pens
ee), que d’en d
etourner voire de cr
eer celles qui, pour cha-
cun et chacune d’entre nous, nous permet d’aller au coeur de ce qui nous
pr
eoccupe. Ce que je sais, en tant que philosophe ou litt
eraire (mon
ignorance quant a mon statut en dit long), c’est que chez moi, cela passe
par la travers
ee d’autres langues, formidables pour se d
eloger de
cat
egories culturelles qui finissent toujours par avoir l’
evidence du naturel ;
et aussi, bien s^ ur, par l’interdisciplinarit
e, avec une attention notamment a
l’
ethologie, a l’anthropologie perspectiviste, a l’histoire, aux
etudes reli-
gieuses, au droit, a l’
ethique … Il faut aussi, enfin, reconna^ıtre ses limites –
je suis tres admirative des sp
ecialistes de stylistique, comme par exem-
ple Sophie Milcent-Lawson qui a initi
e la recherche sur le point de vue
animal, sujet d
esormais aussi d
eploy
e par Davide Vago, ou comme les
adeptes de cette « zoos
emiotique 2.0 » que sont Denis Bertrand et
Gianfranco Marrone – et accepter le fait qu’une vie bien avanc
ee ne permet
pas d’aborder tout ce qu’on souhaiterait aborder ! D’o u l’importance de la
transmission qui joue un r^ ole socio-politique majeur.

St
ephanie Posthumus: I admire Anne’s ability to begin with a capacious

definition of zoopo
etique. I very much identify with her emphasis on an
attachment to the living world’s incredibly diverse ways of interacting and
meaning-making. I would, however, like to sit a little longer with the way
you have asked the question before I offer a definition of
ecocritique. The
fact that you have used the French term in the English question echoes
the work of linguistic and cultural framing that has been at the heart of
my research in this field for over fifteen years. While I refuse to singular-
ize French diff
erance, I argue for developing culturally-specific approaches
to representations of environment, nature, and climate change crisis. In
my research on contemporary French
eco-pens
ee, I have encountered this
diff
erance on multiple occasions: when noting colleagues’ wariness with
respect to (overtly) politicized approaches to reading and interpreting lit-
erary texts (both in France and French Departments in North America),
when negotiating the shifting sands of language and the translatability of
certain terms (ex. nature, landscape, sense of place), when avoiding
nationalist claims to specific genealogies and intellectual traditions, and
when navigating alternative approaches such as g
eocritique, g
eopo
etique,
and
ecopo
etique that ask similar questions.7 As these differences have
emerged and evolved, so too has my way of doing
ecocritique in oppos-
ition to and in parallel with ecocriticism.
20 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

This said, I find it useful to go back to Cheryll Glotfelty’s8 initial defin-

ition of ecocriticism as the study of the relationship between literature
and the physical environment. It has the advantage of being both simple
and open to interpretation: 1) literature can mean genres ranging from
scientific journalism to science fiction, from nature writing to detective
novels,9 from bande dessin
ee to climate fiction, amongst many others; and
2) physical environments can include urban, rural, industrial, third and
in-between spaces, as well as environments on other planets. In addition,
Glotfelty does not specify the kind of environmentalist politics that drives
ecocriticism and instead writes more generally of moving beyond
anthropocentrism. In this sense, ecocriticism has been able to intersect
with ecofeminism, social ecology, deep ecology, queer ecology, and envir-
onmental justice, to name a few.
I do, however, take issue with one of the implicit assumptions of
Glotfelty’s definition of ecocriticism: literature is placed on the side of the
semiotic and the physical environment on the side of the material. To
some extent, this separation is the product of structuralist and post-struc-
turalist philosophies that instituted and then drove the linguistic turn.
From its early stages, ecocriticism has been highly critical of the idea of
language as a “prison house” and sought to close the gap between word
and world.10 And yet by naming the two as separate spheres, Glotfelty’s
definition refuses the semiotic-material or the naturalcultural. (My under-
standing of hybrids is largely informed by Michel Serres’s concept of the
quasi-object and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory.) New develop-
ments in ecocriticism have begun to take up this problem by considering
literature as part of a physical environment; for example, by studying the
history of the book as material object, its changing forms and ecological
footprints, as well as the sustainability of book and publishing industries
(see Sean Cubitt’s Finite Media11). This approach entails a more careful
analysis of textual production, interpretation, and critique as situated in
the eco-material world.
Another promising direction is ecocriticism’s interest in theorizing the
ways in which matter tells its own stories beyond the traditional forms of
language and representation (see Serenella Iovino and Serpel Opperman’s
edited collection Material Ecocriticism12).
Coming back to the specificities of
ecocritique, my book French


Ecocritique13 outlines one possible method for understanding representa-
tions of nature and environment through a culturally-specific lens. In my
analysis of French contemporary philosophers and novelists, I practice a
situated
ecocritique by bringing theory to bear on literature and literature
to illuminate theory by way of four ecologically-informed concepts. First,
I develop the notion of ecological subjectivity as the dynamic processes of
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 21

embodied perception that temporarily come together as identity and

belonging at individual and group levels but that necessarily vary across
forms of life. Such subjectivity does not eschew the structural problems of
gender, class, race but instead asks how these categories are bound up in
matter and physical environment. I then outline the concept of ecological
dwelling as the practices of making place that are key to an embodied
experience that goes beyond surviving and moves toward living care-fully
and response-ably. From subjectivity and dwelling emerge an ecological
politics that similarly refuses the ontological divide between the human
and the non-human. This politics asks who has come together in this
place and seeks to live here and on what terms; it includes the microcosmic
and the macrocosmic but also attends to socio-economic inequalities that
cut across human and non-human differences (hence, the need to examine
oikos as the root of both ecology and economy). Finally, I place this politics
in the larger question of the ecological ends to which contemporary imagi-
naries are moving and/or by which they are driven. There is obviously no
single ecological end, but I challenge the (problematic) rise of apocalyptic
imaginaries in the face of climate change as they tend to lead to a paralyz-
ing fear (see Jean-Paul Eng
elibert’s Fabuler la fin du monde14). Coming
back to the field of literary studies, I conclude the book by asking under
what conditions we can imagine literature’s ecological ends. Such specula-
tion gives rise to a wider variety of affects than those associated with end of
the world predictions or portraits of a world without humans. It also multi-
plies the meaning of the expression “ecological ends” and refuses to co-opt
literature into a global environmentalist politics.
As I write this response in English, I realize that the word
ecocritique is
both inadequate and overdetermined because of the weight it carries as a
French word in an English sentence. Its phonetic strangeness (most
Anglophones would simply pronounce the word as ecocritique) reminds the
reader that language is a physical environment and that the text composes
different linguistic communities. Moreover, it is a word that contains an


excess of meanings and approaches. Ecocritique can be an eco-political ana-
lysis of literature’s (lack of) attention to the problems of habitat destruction,
the sixth greatest extinction, climate change, etc. But it can also be a critique
of the ecopolitics and environmentalist rhetoric that inform such problems


(see Pierre Lascoumes’ L’Eco-pouvoir for example15) as well as the ideology
of scientific truth that has re-emerged in climate change discourse.16 The
point is not to make
ecocritique a catch-all for things environmental, but
rather to include non-literary texts within the field. In this way, it is possible
to trace
ecocritique back to much earlier works such as Michel Serres’ Le
Contrat naturel, Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature, and Isabelle Stengers’
Cosmopolitiques.17
22 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

2. History
L’histoire – ou les histoires – de la zoopo
etique, de l’
ecocritique et de
l’
ecopo
etique sont-elles importantes pour en cerner la compr
ehension,
l’amplitude ou les rapports ?

AS: Vous le sentez, mon usage du terme « zoopo
etique » est en

perp
etuelle
evolution … J’ai commenc
e a employer le mot « zoopo
etique
» au d
ebut des ann
ees 2010 apres une dizaine d’ann
ees a travailler sur la
question animale en litt
erature. J’avais alors plusieurs objectifs et je
d
efinissais le terme en partie en fonction de ceux-ci : d
ecentrer la
recherche litt
eraire de sa focalisation sur l’humain, l
egitimer ce sujet «
indigne » qu’
etaient les b^etes en litt
erature, notamment en les sortant des
analyses all
egoriques, symboliques ou psychanalytiques dont je me d
electe
souvent mais qui ne doivent pas ^etre h
eg
emoniques sur le sujet animal. Il
s’agissait de rebrancher la recherche sur la possibilit
e pour la litt
erature –
cet art du d
elogement linguistique et de l’extraterritorialit
e dirait George
Steiner – d’exprimer d’autres manieres de d
eployer la vie. Ce qui est
symptomatique d’une pr
eoccupation globale sur les rapports entre langage
cr
eateur et vies anim
ees est qu’Aaron M. Moe, dans son essai f
econd
Zoopoetics paru en 2014,18 l’employait de façon exactement concomitante


aux Etats-Unis … « Quoi de plus gai qu’un air du temps ? » disait
Deleuze – ou de plus inqui
etant vu le contexte
ecologique terrible qui
explique le succes de ce terme, et depuis bien plus longtemps, de
l’
ecocritique. Je laisserai Stephanie r
epondre sur la question de
l’
ecocritique et de l’
ecopo
etique : je tiens juste a dire que j’avais tendance
il y a quelques ann
ees a inclure la zoopo
etique dans ces champs de
recherche, mais je crois de plus en plus que ces approches se croisent,
intimement, plus qu’elles ne s’englobent. D’autre part, je ne tiens pas la
zoopo
etique pour une discipline, mais pour une d
emarche, et m^eme un
chemin qui touche a ma vie entiere, y compris la plus intime. Je pense
bien s^ ur a ce chemin nourri par le dialogue entre le « je » et le « tu »
cher a Martin Buber : mon cheminement passe des lors par une attention
renouvel
ee a certains textes et a certains auteurs et autrices peu
etudi
es
ou toujours selon une focalisation humanocentr
ee ; je tente ainsi de
m’ouvrir a d’autres mondes et d’autres modes de vie que ceux des
humains, de restituer nos entrelacements avec les autres vivants, avec
leurs langages si diff
erents des n^ otres, ainsi qu’aux nouages et aux mail-
lages avec le monde. Et je vous renvoie vers Erwin Straus, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, David Abram, Timothy Morton ou Tim Ingold … , des
lectures pour moi indissociables, des que je le peux, de d
eambulations
urbaines incongrues, de longues stases dans un petit jardin qui m’est cher
ou d’une immersion tres physique dans une nature tres sauvage (ces deux
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 23

termes sont probl
ematiques en th
eorie mais s’imposent dans la vie et

nous remettent a notre place quand on marche : fragile, intense et aussi
tres dr^ ole quand avec mon complice Jonathan Pollock,
ecopo
eticien
doubl
e d’un ornithophile, nous traversons une riviere en crue ou un col
qui me semblait depuis la veille inaccessible, accompagn
es par des oiseaux
qui s’annoncent les uns aux autres notre arriv
ee).
Comme Stephanie avec l’
ecocritique,19 j’ai l’impression, quasiment cha-
que ann
ee, qu’on me demande de d
efinir la zoopo
etique … et chaque fois,
j’
evolue et d
ecentre mon interrogation, car les d
efinitions pr
ec
edentes

etaient li
ees a un instant T de la recherche collective (qui
evolue tres vite)
ou de mon propre travail, ou alors je tiens pour acquis si ce n’est d
eja
d
epass
e ce que j’ai dit avant ! Parfois aussi, tout simplement, je n’ai pas
envie de me r
ep
eter … Je suis notamment tres reconnaissante a Stephanie,
ainsi qu’a sa comparse Louisa Mackenzie, de m’avoir demand
e en 2013 de
faire un
etat des lieux pour French Thinking about Animals (l’ouvrage est
paru en 2015).20 J’ai pu ainsi mesurer le chemin que j’avais parcouru, com-
prendre o u on en
etait collectivement, et vers o
u j’avais envie de me diriger
a titre personnel. Je crois qu’il est tres important, pour comprendre ce
qu’est la zoopo
etique, d’avoir en m
emoire ce fait que les
etudes animales
litt
eraires n’existaient pas du tout dans la sphere europ
eenne de langue
française au tournant des ann
ees 2000, il y a vingt ans, et que l’
ecocritique
ou l’
ecopo
etique
etaient plus avanc
ees, mais encore
emergentes (avec
Stephanie bien s^ ur, Alain Suberchicot, Nathalie Blanc, Pierre
Schoentjes … ). Tres rares
etaient les recherches sur les b^etes en tant que
telles, sur le fait de prendre au s
erieux la volont
e des
ecrivains et des

ecrivaines de ne pas les consid
erer comme des pr^ete-noms ou des masques
de l’humain : au d
ebut des ann
ees 2000, il y avait le travail de Lucile
Desblache (qui de façon significative d’un vrai manque en France
enseignait … en Grande-Bretagne), celles fondatrices et inspirantes de Jean-
Christophe Bailly, et, tout juste amorc
ees, celles que je mettais en chantier.
Pendant plus de dix ans, du d
ebut des ann
ees 2000 au d
ebut des ann
ees
2010, la focale a donc
et
e clairement et strat
egiquement ax
ee sur les ani-
maux en litt
erature, parce qu’ils avaient
et
e r
eduits au « silence » pour rep-


rendre le terme du livre s
eminal d’Elisabeth de Fontenay, Le Silence des
21
b^etes. Il me devenait tres n
ecessaire de travailler avec d’autres : l’objectif
du programme de recherche Animalitt
erature que j’ai cr
e
e a l’Universit
e
Sorbonne nouvelle22 et qui r
eunissait des sp
ecialistes de lettre et des philo-
sophes
etait de tenter de savoir ce qu’il se passait … dans d’autres disci-
plines, d’en conna^ıtre les enjeux, les d
ebats mais aussi les rythmes propres,
pour parvenir a approcher ce labile « sujet » animal, et lancer les premiers
collectifs sur l’animalit
e litt
eraire. Puis il y a eu l’organisation avec Anne
24 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

Mairesse, a partir de 2009–2010, du Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

French and Francophone International Colloquium,23 sur le theme «
Humain-Animal / Human-Animal », qui a permis de rassembler pres de
trois cents intervenants et plus de quatre cents participants sur le sujet a
San Francisco en 2011. C’
etait un vrai lancement des
etudes animales litt
er-
aires dans la sphere acad
emique, notamment française, et pour moi de la
zoopo
etique. Dans le m^eme temps est n
e le programme Animots,24 soutenu
par l’Agence nationale de la recherche de 2010 a 2014, dont j’
etais la por-
teuse et dont j’assurais le partenariat c^ ot
e CNRS et EHESS, Alain
Romestaing se chargeant du partenariat c^ ot
e Sorbonne nouvelle : y partici-
paient aussi Andr
e Benhaïm, Eliane
DalMolin, Lucile Desblache, Jacques
Poirier, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Alain Schaffner, et, a la coordination scientifi-
que, Audrey Lasserre puis Sabrina Valy, bref des sp
ecialistes de France, de


Grande-Bretagne et des Etats-Unis, ce qui permettait de croiser les appro-
ches et de d
emultiplier les actions.
Certains objectifs me semblent aujourd’hui remplis, et je me sens des
lors tres libre avec ce terme que je ne cesse de faire
evoluer dans mon

ecriture, une
ecriture que je ne dissocie pas de mon cheminement intel-
lectuel et existentiel. Le terme « zoopo
etique », et je m’en r
ejouis, est
d
esormais employ
e en Europe, et notamment en France, par de nombreux
collegues et
etudiants, soit a titre particulier (conf
erences, articles … ), soit
collectivement (s
eminaires de masters, num
eros de revue ou ouvrages col-
lectifs, carnets de veille et de recherche tels que Animots, Ecopo

etique

25
Perpignan, Epist
emocritique, Epokhe, Ecozon@, Literature.green pour
n’en citer que quelques-uns). Je me m^eme suis rendue compte au milieu
des ann
ees 2010, lors des s
eminaires de Master en « Th
eorie de la
litt
erature » que je proposais a des
etudiants et des
etudiantes de l’EHESS,
de l’ENS et de l’universit
e Paris Sorbonne (c’
etait un Master cohabilit
e
entre ces trois
etablissements) puis lors de soutenances de theses, que le
terme « zoopo
etique »
etait employ
e comme si son usage
etait canonique
et av
er
e depuis longtemps, alors que cela ne faisait que deux ou trois ans
qu’il avait cours en
etudes litt
eraires ! Le revers de la m
edaille acad
emique
est que la notion de « zoopo
etique » a tendance a se s
edimenter : il y a
des passages oblig
es, des termes ou des textes qui reviennent constam-
ment, des effets de mode, eux-m^emes pris dans cette « acc
el
eration »

evoqu
ee par Hartmut Rosa qui donne parfois l’impression d’un
jonglage … J’y suis moi-m^eme prise bien s^ ur ! L’essentiel reste, que zoo-
po
etique,
ecopo
etique ou
ecocritique, la transmission se fasse, et que les
jeunes qui commencent leur recherche sur les relations entre
ecologie,
vivants et litt
erature puissent avoir des bases de travail, un historique sur
lequel s’appuyer et duquel se d
egager pour d
efricher des terrains qui ne
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 25

l’ont pas encore
et
e, tout comme des d
ebouch
es
editoriaux et

professionnels.

SP: My thanks to Anne for adding a question about the histories and
genealogies of our respective fields in this interview. It will allow me to
develop further my previous point about
ecocritique being broader than
the area of literary studies. One of the differences, I would argue, between

ecocritique and zoopo
etique is the ways in which scientific knowledge and
the literary imagination intersect. At its inception, ecocriticism often
aligned itself with the environmental sciences to examine and critique lit-
erary representations of nature and the physical world. The most adamant
advocate for this kind of ecocriticism is Glen Love in his book Practical
Ecocriticism26 whereas the most pointed critique of this view of scientific
knowledge can be found in Dana Phillips book The Truth of Ecology.27
The status of science and in particular climate change science continues
to be a subject of debate within ecocriticism as can be seen in recent
ecocritical analysis and responses to climate change scepticism (see for
example my co-authored work Climate Change Scepticism. A
Transnational Ecocritical Analysis28).
I have been navigating the space of interdisciplinary study since com-
pleting an undergraduate honours degree in both mathematics and
French literature in the mid 1990s. When working on my doctoral thesis,
I was able to study the texts of an anthropologist, Claude L
evi-Strauss, a
philosopher, Michel Serres, and a novelist, Michel Tournier, in large part
thanks to my supervisor, Tony Purdy, who encouraged me to follow my
interest in nature and ecology across different disciplines. While ecocriti-
cism did not come to my attention until I began writing the conclusion
to my doctoral thesis in 2002, it was clearly a good fit for the interdiscip-
linary perspective I was using to examine the philosophical and epistemo-
logical foundations of the nature/culture binary. Even though I did use
the word
ecocritique in French a couple of times in my doctoral thesis,
the word remained an anomaly for quite a few years! While there was
clearly interest in nature writing on the part of Americanists in France in
the early 2000s (see the work of Thomas Pughe and Michel Granger in
particular), there was little to no engagement with ecocriticism until
Nathalie Blanc, Denis Chartier, and Thomas Pughe’s seminal article on
literature and ecology in 2008. Interestingly, they choose the term

ecopo
etique instead of the more literal translation of
ecocritique. As Blanc
has pointed out since then, the aim was not to centre this approach on
literary studies, but instead to examine more broadly the ways in which
creative acts make with and of the physical environment. Similarly, my
first articles were more about a contemporary French
eco-pens
ee than
about literary representations of nature. And yet, from my early
26 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

experience, there seemed to be little room for an interdisciplinary

ecocritique at the time in France (at a 2010 conference at the Sorbonne
organized by a group of environmental historians I was advised that the
work of Serres and Latour were not serious academic pursuits and that I
would be better off examining the literary tradition of chasse et p^eche). As
I have noted elsewhere, it is in part because I am a French Studies scholar
working outside of France that I have been able to establish an
ecocritique
that is deeply indebted to working across disciplines.
Whereas
ecopo
etique places itself squarely within literary studies, the
field of
ecocritique cultivates disciplinary hybridity. The emergence of the
humanit
es environnementales in France has created a fertile ground for
the growth of such an
ecocritique. When I was first approached in 2013
to contribute an overview of ecocriticism to the website, Portail des
humanit
es environnementales, I was delighted to be working with anthro-
pologists, geographers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, amongst
others. The web portal led to the publication of the edited collection,
Humanit
es environnementales. Enqu^etes et contre-enqu^etes, spearheaded
by Guillaume Blanc, Elise
Demeulenaere and Wolf Feuerhahn. This col-
lection has since become a key text in the establishment of an interdiscip-
linary method “en faveur de la prise de conscience environnementaliste,
tout en exerçant une r
eflexivit
e critique sur les arguments
ecologiques”
(265). Journal publications such as my 2019 co-edited issue of Ecozon@
which includes articles by anthropologists, film studies scholars, geogra-
phers, literary critics, and visual artists, and the 2015 issue of Multitudes
“Parler nature” which includes an interview with a radio talk show host,
eco-sound studies and a body memoir piece, also attest to the ways in
which
ecocritique blurs disciplinary boundaries. The point is not to erase
methodological differences, but to closely examine the ways in which the
analysis of nature and environment chafes against the traditional methods
of close reading canonical texts and literary studies.

3. Corpus; linguistic and cultural scope of the field

What works or objects are implicated in your research and in your con-
ception of your field? To what extent are the frontiers of your field
defined by national and/or linguistic factors? How transnational are

ecocritique and zoopo
etique, and how transnational should they aspire to
be? What are the benefits and drawbacks to expanding or restricting the
scope of the field?
Quels textes, auteurs, corps, ou objets sont au centre de votre travail ?
Dans quelle mesure votre domaine de recherche est-il d
elimit
e par des
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 27

frontieres nationales ou linguistiques ? Quelle est votre position vis-a-vis

la recherche transnationale dans l’
ecocritique et la zoopo
etique ?
AS: Comme je le disais, le programme Animots a
et
e tres important car il
s’agissait vraiment de faire acc
eder les
etudes animales litt
eraires a la vis-
ibilit
e, de les l
egitimer et d’obtenir des moyens financiers (l’argent
repr
esente une valeur) pour cr
eer des actions collectives et offrir un lieu
d’accueil qui ne soit pas une impasse pour les jeunes chercheurs et cher-
cheuses en Master et en Doctorat. Il fallait ^etre audible, et combler des
manques criants : il
etait crucial de dialoguer avec l’ecocriticism nord-
am
ericain et anglo-saxon, il
etait fondamental de centrer l’attention et la
r
eflexion sur l’animalit
e, les animaux, les b^etes en litt
erature de langue
française des vingtieme-vingt-et-unieme siecles. L’objectif
etait de mettre
au jour des th
ematiques fondamentales, de rendre visibles les invisibilis
es
(auteurs/autrices ou bestioles !), de d
ecrypter certains proc
ed
es stylistiques
en jeu, de r
einvestir autrement l’histoire litt
eraire et de renouveler les ca-
nons.29 Qaneh en h
ebreu, qui a donn
e le mot « canon », d
esigne une
canne utilis
ee comme unit
e de mesure : un canon litt
eraire est souvent un
instrument induisant des mesures prescriptives qui t
emoignent d’une
id
eologie sur ce qu’est ou non la « bonne » litt
erature. Le terme h
ebreu
renvoie cependant aussi au roseau et au jonc : un usage plus souple du
mot, soucieux des
evolutions de l’histoire, permet d’envisager comment
un canon renouvel
e peut contribuer a la constitution d’un nouvel espace
symbolique commun, a partir duquel inventer de nouvelles façons d’abor-
der les oeuvres, et de rendre la recherche politiquement agissante.
Dix ans plus tard, la donne acad
emique et l’
ecoute m
ediatique et sociale
est en France totalement diff
erente, dans le tres bon sens. Je m’
etais focal-
is
ee dans les ann
ees 2000 sur des corpus de langue française modernes et
contemporains, pour avoir un premier terrain homogene, formuler des
questions qui ne l’
etaient pas encore (sur les b^etes dans leur dimension
non all
egorique de l’humain, sur la chasse dans son rapport a la narration,
sur l’hybridit
e et les m
etamorphoses, les autoportraits en animaux, l’objec-
talisation du vivant, les relations entre
ethique et langage … ) : Jean
Giono, Marcel Proust, Albert Cohen, Marie Darrieussecq, B
eatrix Beck,
Jean Rolin, Jacques Lacarriere … Puis j’ai
elargi mes corpus selon un vaste
compas g
eographique et linguistique, mais sur des sujets particuliers pour
ne pas niveler l’
etude par des questionnements trop g
en
eraux et pouvoir
tenir compte de contextes culturels et historiques pr
ecis :
ecritures de la tra-
que et de la qu^ete mais aussi
ecritures plus pr
ecaires de la collecte, du col-
lage et du tissage ; entrecroisements de destins entre humains et animaux ;

elevage industriel ; arche et souci des vivants ; complicit
es et jeux ; r^ole de
l’histoire naturelle et de la diffusion des sciences du vivant chez les

ecrivains et les
ecrivaines … Le transnational envisag
e comme
28 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

d
ecentrement, dialogue et nourriture est fondamental, mais je ne crois pas

a la transhistoricit
e : au contraire, il importe, pour rendre justice et ^etre
juste, de toujours prendre soin de singulariser les situations.
Il est donc important d’avoir des corpus qui fassent sens, et tout autant
de les ouvrir a d’autres manieres d’investir la langue : il y a des grammaires
et des syntaxes culturelles du monde, et, par-dela chaque
ecrivain, chaque
langue nous est une clef d’entr
ee dans un univers de vie particulier. D’o u
l’importance des programmes et r
eseaux internationaux : je suis tres heu-
reuse de voir que la revue Ecozon@, que les projets portugais Limiares
Homem/Animal/M
aquina et Ficç~oes de caça: a caça como motivo e met
afora
na literatura portuguesa30 ou que de nombreux colloques se fassent
d
esormais en plusieurs langues, et pas forc
ement des langues dominantes
ou ex-dominantes comme l’anglais ou le français … De m^eme, il ne peut
pas y avoir de recherche franco-française, c’est un non-sens absolu :
etant
rattach
ee au CNRS o u cette nomenclature ne fait pas sens, la distinction
entre « litt
erature française », « litt
erature francophone » et « litt
erature
compar
ee » me para^ıt un exotisme universitaire m
etropolitain ! M^eme si
elle a un historique que je comprends, l’emploi de l’expression « animaux
non-humains » pour dire « les humains », qui vient de la sphere nord-
am
ericaine et anglo-saxonne, ne me satisfait en revanche jamais : c’est un
tour de passe-passe qui asserte ce qu’il veut mettre au rencart, a savoir
l’omnipr
esence et l’omnipotence de « l’humain ». Du coup, j’utilise des for-
mules bancales, b^atardes, insatisfaisantes … et vivantes, du type « les autres
animaux », « les humains, qui sont aussi des animaux », etc., selon les con-
textes et non de façon absolue comme une potion magique.
SP: My research publications and conference talks are clearly rooted in
French contemporary studies, but I inhabit this space only partially since
moving from the French Department at McMaster University to the
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill University
in 2011. Even if the program in comparative literature ‘died’ quite a few
years ago at McGill university, its theoretical spirit drives the way I teach
my classes on European Environmental Imaginations, Animal Studies,
Posthumanism, and Critical Theory. Teaching classes outside my field of
specialisation has made me humbler about the kind of knowledge that I
bring to the classroom. I have even taught undergraduate students in the
sciences for the McGill School of the Environment. Explaining to a group
of mechanical engineers why it’s important to read Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake31 has very much challenged my disciplinary foundations!
While I still have one foot firmly on the ground of French studies, my
other foot has strayed further and further away from these disciplinary
and geographical boundaries (of course, a scholar can only ‘stretch’
so far!).
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 29

To some extent, the expression ‘transnational ecocriticism’ aptly

describes the approach I adopt in courses on environmental thought and
culture. If I prefer the term ‘comparative,’ it is because of the history of
this discipline that has had to contend with critiques of universalism and
canonization while also emphasizing linguistic and cultural identities as
structures in constant flux. In this respect, my work is very much
indebted to that of Ursula Heise who has on multiple occasions persua-
sively argued for a better understanding of the cultural frameworks
through which global environmental issues are experienced and imag-
ined.32 Such attentiveness to difference in the field of
ecocritique means
listening to anthropologists who warn against the concept of culture as
the ultimate tool for othering (Lila Agu-Lughod) as well as to compara-
tists and philosophers who hold to notions of untranslatability (Emily
Apter; Barbara Cassin). For Michel Serres, language is the first and fore-
most place in which we dwell, and we do so as concretely as we inhabit a
bed, a kitchen, a workshop, a country, a home.33 Comparative ecocriti-
cism, then, also means caring for the many languages we encounter, tra-
verse, and experience. Such linguistic and cultural diversity is inseparable
from arguments about biodiversity as can be seen in the poetry of Innu
women such as Natasha Kanap
e Fontaine’s Manifeste Assi and the novels
of Qu
eb
ecois writers such as Audr
ee Wilhelmy’s Blanc R
esine.34 As such
examples illustrate, I have been more concerned as of late with asking
how language works in situated contexts than with abiding to national lit-
erary traditions.
To come back to the original question,
ecocritique requires its scholars
to circulate in multilingual spaces rather than remain sequestered to one
area, literary period, genre, or national literature. It is a field nourished
by many different areas of thought because a literary scholar does not
necessarily find sympathetic listeners within his or her own field. Cross-
fertilization has always both compromised and fed my understanding of
‘French’
ecocritique. In a recent project, I had the opportunity to examine
the political and historical specificities of climate change scepticism in
France. While my co-authors and I argue for a transnational approach in
the book, our individual chapters on climate scepticism in Britain, France,
Germany and the USA clearly illustrate that we are not applying a single
ecocritical method. Each of us engage with the texts in question in our
own ways. In my chapter, I examine closely the tropes of the imposture
and the ecological order that dominate climate sceptic discourse in
France. Moreover, I point to the fact that novels such as Jo€el Baqu
e’s La
Fonte des glaces35 adopt the satirical mode and effectively erase the strict
division between climate fiction and climate sceptic fiction. Such a blur-
ring of political divisions means acknowledging a greater diversity of
30 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

reasons of why we disagree about climate change (to echo the title of
geographer Mike Hulme’s 2009 book36). This foray into climate (sceptic)
texts illustrates once again my point that
ecocritique is open to different
literary genres, academic disciplines, environmental discourses, and eco-
logical politics (a point to which I will come back).

4. Frontiers, areas needing attention

Where are you taking your work right now? What, for you, are the most
exciting subjects for ecocritical or zoopoetic work?
Sur quoi travaillez-vous en ce moment ? A  votre avis, quels sont les
sujets qui m
eritent plus d’attention a l’heure actuelle ?
AS: Le sujet de votre collectif ne pouvait que m’enchanter, puisqu’il donne
bien s^ ur envie de traverser les frontieres et de vivre dans les plis et les inter-
37
stices : je termine pr
ecis
ement un livre intitul
e Une b^ete entre les lignes.
Essai de zoopo
etique qui va para^ıtre chez Wildproject. Ce livre m’importe car
il fait
etat d’un parcours de recherche riche de deux d
ecennies d’interroga-
tions, mais il est tres compliqu
e a
ecrire, justement parce que je n’ai cess
e de
d
eplacer mes propres frontieres int
erieures, d’entrecroiser mes lignes de vie
et de pens
ee. Les tempos, les intensit
es, les rythmes, les phras
es des b^etes
comme des textes me passionnent. De m^eme que le rapport entre la nais-
sance, il y a pres de 3500 ans, des alphabets, ou plut^ ot des alefbets, dans leur
lien a l’habitation du monde et aux partages d’exp
erience avec les autres
vivants ; et je suis fascin
ee par la mat
erialit
e et la corpor
eit
e des
ecritures ou
de leurs supports, y compris cet
ecran qui me fait face et qui est mon double
cyclop
een, une extension de mon regard et de mon cerveau … mais reli
e a la
toile mondiale ! Parfois un peu m
edusant, il faut l’avouer.
Je ne crois pas qu’il y ait des sujets qui m
eritent plus d’attention que
d’autres en matiere
ecopo
etique, puisque pr
ecis
ement, ce qui fait la non-
essence de l’
ecologie litt
eraire, c’est le fait que tout est en production,
d
eflation, entrelacs, enchev^etrement, mouvement, cycle de la vie et de la
mort, transformation … J’ai juste tendance a penser que tout ce que je
n’aborde pas ou pas suffisamment par manque de temps ou de comp
etence
est crucial, et que cela peut constituer des propositions de recherche stimu-
lantes en Master et bien s^ ur pour celles et ceux qui se lancent dans une
these : les romans graphiques, la bande-dessin
ee, les litt
eratures de jeunesse,
de science-fiction, d’heroic fantasy … dont je pense d’ailleurs qu’il convient
de ne pas les isoler des autres formes litt
eraires; les enjeux des zoo-
f
eminismes ; les animaux et le comique ; la d
econstruction du r
ecit
t
el
eologique orient
e vers une fin ; la po
etique des vivants autres que les
mammiferes et les oiseaux ; la m
ecanisation des plantes nourricieres ou des
arbres a bois … Le champ de la po
esie est de plus en plus investi, c’est une
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 31

bonne chose, m^eme si je pense, sans parvenir a le faire moi-m^eme suffi-

samment, qu’il faut faire
eclater les genres litt
eraires acad
emiques (« la »
po
esie, « le » th
e^atre, « la » prose narrative … ).
SP: Similar to Anne, I have been developing recent research projects
around thematic and theoretical questions rather than following strict
national literatures.38 While bounded by the contemporary period, the
Imaginaire botanique project examines the ways in which plants circulate
in contemporary texts written in French following three different axes: sci-
entific (in the form of literary herbariums), economic (through colonial
traces of plantations), and aesthetic (in the form of writing about garden
spaces). In our corpus, the hybridity of the texts’ genres requires new read-
ing strategies that focus on short descriptive passages rather than on plot
or human characters. Moreover, each plant in the text requires its own
lens, set of knowledges, and enquiries into the fields of botany, biology,
and environmental studies.
So, on the one hand, my “ecocritical work” has become more specific,
zeroing in on the challenges of individual relationships to the non-human
world. Rather than discussing the “eco” as the environment as a whole, I
have been asking how this peace lily plant in my office, this borer-beetle-
treated ash tree, this dog-eared, worn-out paperback have called me on
specific occasions to pay attention. Each of these interactions have
required different responses on my part depending on context. The point
is not to scale up to higher levels of eco-planetarity but rather to scale
down, examining cultural and linguistic filters at various stages. I have
also discovered that writing as reponse-ability can take different forms,
ranging from the personal essay to the academic article, from the science
fiction short story to the private journal entry.39
On the other hand, I have been exploring alternative digital methodolo-
gies as a way of moving away from the traditional close reading of literary
analysis. One component of the Imaginaire botanique research project has
been to create digital maps of plant movement across and within literary
texts, which has allowed me to build on a previous interest of mine to con-
join the environmental and the digital humanities while maintaining a
“small-data” approach (see my co-authored article on nature and technol-
ogy in Michel Houellebecq’s novel La Possibilit
e d’une ^ıle40). The tools of
literary cartography and digital text analysis require a layering approach
that connects the text to many other kinds of media. The edges of the print
text fall away, creating networks that foreground the plant’s agency. It may
seem somewhat paradoxical that plant agency can be experienced most eco-
logically through digital forms. But this is exactly one of the arguments
that Alenda Chang puts forward with respect to experiencing environment
and nature in video games (see Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games41).
32 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

To further explore the posthumanist imaginary of machine, animal,

and plant encounters, I have been delving deeply into science fiction
understood broadly, asking how such a genre may be more ecological
than much of environmental literature (as it is defined by Lawrence Buell
in The Environmental Imagination42). Reading works such as Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, NK
Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Naomi
Alderman’s The Power, Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City,43 to name a few, I have
found much solace and hope to counter the apocalyptic or post-apocalyp-
tic projections of climate fiction. If I have drifted quite away from French
literary studies into a nebulous space of Anglo-feminist science fiction, it
is because I have come back to an earlier passion that predates by quite a
few years my academic research. Revisiting an adolescent passion for fan-
tasy literature, that I considered too “non-academic” for many years, I
have made space for my own affective responses to texts.
This brings me back to a point I made earlier about
ecocritique need-
ing to grapple with the agency or liveliness of the literary text. As Rosi
Braidotti writes in The Posthuman: “What comes to the fore [ … ] is the
creative capacity that consists in being able to re-member and to endure
the affective charges of texts as events” (166). In a reading group entitled
“Are Texts Alive?” that I co-led at McGill University in 2017, we explored
the question of how literature constitutes a form of affective matter
through works such as Julianna Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with
Lungs, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Jos
e Saramago’s The Lives of Things,
and Renato Rosaldo’s The Day of Shelly’s Death,44 amongst others.
Rejecting the traditional divisions between poetry, short story, and per-
sonal memoir, we created a space for re-membering and enduring textual
affects such as grief and joy, humour and horror, incomprehension and
indifference. New materialism offers a rich theoretical framework for
examining such responses, but so, too, does the pragmatic literary
approach of a scholar such as Florent Coste in Explore: Investigations
litt
eraires. Our biweekly seminars were deeply engaged in what Coste calls
“une politique th
eorique capable de cr
eer de la pluralit
e, de d
evelopper
des possibilit
es de connexion, d’
eclater les cl^ otures confortables et les
identit
es rassurantes” (15), a quote that serves as a wonderful transition
to your next question about the politics of
ecocritique.

5. Politics
To what extent do you see
ecocritique and zoopo
etique as political in
orientation or horizon? Given the urgency of ecological and
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 33

environmental issues today, do these domains of critical inquiry have an

activist dimension?
Dans quelle mesure l’
ecocritique et la zoopo
etique sont-elles politiques ?
Comment est-ce que vous envisagez la dimension politique de votre
travail ?
AS: Cela fait longtemps que je dis que la zoopo
etique est une zoopo
ethi-
que et une zoopolitique. J’ai pr
ecis
e tout a l’heure a quel point les termes
qu’on emploie pour dire le monde ou dire une approche scientifique
expriment, frontalement ou en filigrane, un point de vue politique … Le
politique est consubstantiel a la zoopo
etique, dont je viens aussi de rap-
peler qu’elle est un chemin de vie. J’ai ainsi commenc
e a travailler sur les
corps animaux avant m^eme de travailler sur les repr
esentations des corps
des femmes et sur leur naturalisation a outrance, qui a de nombreux
effets pervers si elle n’est pas historicis
ee ou r
esolument
eclair
ee : les biais
ne sont stimulants que s’ils sont rep
er
es et pr
esent
es comme tels.45
Je trouve tres int
eressant qu’un certain
ecof
eminisme tente de d
epasser
ou de fluidifier le clivage entre f
eminisme constructiviste et f
eminisme
essentialisant – je raisonne pour ma part davantage avec le queer et le
trans … –, et j’attends les
etudiantes et
etudiants sur ce que j’appelle le
zoof
eminisme, qui permet de croiser « animalit
e » et « f
eminin » (les guil-
lemets indexent qu’il s’agit de constructions culturelles a d
eplier). D’autre
part, l’antis
emitisme et le racisme inflationnels en Europe orientent mon
travail sur les « noms d’oiseaux » et autres insultes st
er
eotyp
ees autorisant
la mise au ban de tel ou tel groupe, au nom de leur animalisation, hors
de l’espece humaine.46 Ce pas de c^ ot
e qui me conduit a examiner de
l’int
erieur le fonctionnement ou le durcissement de la langue me conduit
aussi a l’interroger a partir de l’herm
eneutique h
ebraïque : mon objectif
est de repenser des cat
egorisations du vivant souvent envisag
ees a partir
d’un h
eritage hyper visible, celui du grec et du latin, pour en infl
echir et
en pluraliser les interpr
etations. J’ai ainsi engag
e un tres gros chantier de
r
eflexion sur les repr
esentations de l’arche (de No
e mais pas seulement),
qui, selon les points de vue culturels ou id
eologiques, peuvent ^etre radi-
calement oppos
ees. Je crois que l’
ecopo
etique et la zoopo
etique – comme
les positionnements
ecologiques qui sont tres diversifi
es voire parfois
antagonistes les uns avec les autres – brouillent de nombreuses pistes
r
epertori
ees : il en r
esulte des effets d’ouverture et d’incertitude qui « obli-
gent » au dialogue, au risque f
econd du d
esaccord raisonn
e, ou a nous
d
eprendre des oppositions et des crispations h
erit
ees qui
echouent a
d
ecrire le monde de la vie et la recherche actuelle ou a venir.
Mon travail sur l’arche recoupe bien s^ ur celui sur l’objectalisation des
vivants en litt
erature, qui m’occupe depuis des ann
ees. Les conditions de
non-vie faites aux b^etes « de rente » (quelle expression … ) que j’
etudie a
34 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

travers les repr
esentations litt
eraires de l’
elevage industriel, les extinctions

massives, l’empoisonnement de la Terre, l’apparition des b^etes, des plantes
ou des
el
ements au cœur des d
esastres humains, le r
eexamen de ce que
j’appelle l’infra-animalit
e ou la vermine, ont jou
e un r^ ole moteur dans
mon approche zoopo
etique. Je parlais tout a l’heure de l’importance de
l’Histoire, « avec sa grande hache » selon Georges Perec, dans mon trav-
ail. Il importe, en
ecologie litt
eraire, de ne pas utiliser certaines situations
pour des causes qui ne leur sont pas li
ees ; si on le fait, il convient d’ex-
pliquer et d’assumer pourquoi on met en rapport des situations. Je suis
parfois sid
er
ee par les substitutions que certains operent entre les tres his-
toriques camps d’extermination de Treblinka ou d’Auschwitz, et l’
elevage
industriel et ses abattages de masse ; il y a dans l’id
ee d’un «
eternel
Treblinka », pour reprendre la formule facile de Charles Patterson, des
postulats id
eologiques, des impens
es ou des raccourcis que je mettrai a
jour dans mon essai sur l’
elevage industriel en litt
erature. Peu importe en
fait que cette assimilation soit structurellement erron
ee (puisque l’objectif
des camps n’
etait pas la reproduction !), car m^eme si elle
etait logique-
ment juste (comme ce pourrait ^etre le cas pour l’esclavage), elle ne serait
de toute façon ni « bonne a penser », ni « bonne pour la pens
ee » : pas
juste aux niveaux
ethique comme historique. Je suis bien plus sensible
aux d
emarches prudentes et fines d’une Anna Tsing, d’une Roxane
Dunbar-Ortiz ou d’une Nastassja Martin quand elles se demandent, sans
les homog
en
eiser, sans les mythifier, ce que certains groupes ou peuples
dont le monde est actuellement d
eja sous les eaux, mourant de soif ou
r
eduit a des ruines peuvent – ou non – nous dire et nous apprendre sur
ce qui advient. Enfin, et c’est la toute l’importance d’une diffusion de la
recherche qui tente d’atteindre des publics diversifi
es en recourant a
d’autres m
ediums47 que les canaux acad
emiques ou m
ediatiques culturels
habituels, il faut rappeler que la politique (la vie en commun, et malheu-
reusement souvent la vie contre le commun) passe par le poiein et par le
logos, par un faire qui est un langage, par un langage qui peut ^etre propa-
gande ou au contraire alerte, t
emoignage et invention. Ce que dit
St
ephanie (juste un peu plus bas !) sur la n
ecessit
e cr
eative de faire sortir
les livres des salles de classes et de colloques est fondamental et je la suis
totalement : sortir en collectif (dans la nature mais aussi dans des lieux
urbains parfois incongrus) permet d’a
erer la pens
ee, de la performer
autrement, de toucher d’autres publics et d’^etre touch
ee par eux en retour.
Enfin, ^etre attentive aux allures signifiantes de vivants si diversifi
es qu’ils
sont parfois incommensurables, tout comme aux langues non dominantes
ou aux usages subversifs d’une langue largement r
epandue, c’est envisager
la vie de façon zoopo
etique : sous l’angle de l’entrecroisement fructueux
entre le vif, l’alt
erit
e et le collectif.
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 35

SP: As I have argued elsewhere, a problematic dichotomy has been con-

structed between an
ecopo
etique that is somehow meant to inhabit a
“purely theoretical and literary” space and an
ecocritique that is seemingly
“too politically-oriented” to have a grounding in the field of French liter-
ary studies.48 But I will try and state as simply as possible the ethical
question at the heart of my own ecocritical work: what is the ethical
responsibility of literary scholars to bring environmental issues into the
field of literature and to bring the field of literature into scientific and
political debates about climate change? Given the complexity of these
issues including habitat loss, increasing numbers of climate refugees, and
the rise of nationalist ideologies, I could ask like Amitav Ghosh does in
The Great Derangement whether literature is up to the task.49
If the point is to write a novel that will mobilize a single universal
environmental global response to all these issues, then literature is bound
to fail. Novels that follow a political agenda have not ever been very good
at appealing to a wide range of readers because they reduce the complex-
ity of the living world to a single issue. Even when a literary text does
attempt to imaginatively tackle the many local and global issues of climate
change, it often does so by appealing to overused forms of the tragic and
the apocalyptic. Very realist portrayals of climate change science (like Ian
McEwan’s Solar50) and climate change effects (Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Forty Signs of Rain51) often only interest readers who are already con-
vinced by the urgency of climate change issues. When ecocriticism advo-
cates for texts capable of bringing about an environmentalist response, it
tends to reinforce only one kind of environmental imagination, the
“right” one. I am calling instead for an approach that is capable of read-
ing a wide variety of texts from an ecological perspective by 1) identifying
the non-human elements and focusing on them (a reading practice that
backgrounds the human as much as possible); and 2) taking seriously the
literary text as a material object that circulates in various contexts and
acts upon readers in different ways (which means rethinking reader-
response theory, but also cultural studies in terms of book clubs, print
culture, etc.)
Such ecological readings break down the division between “Literature”
and literatures, between environmentalist and non-environmentalist texts.
The most ethically challenging book I have written to date is Climate
Change Scepticism with Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody, and George
Handley. Adopting the position that climate change sceptics need to be
taken seriously has not been easy. Fellow ecocritics have asked: why waste
your time? what is the moral worth of engaging with sceptics? what if
such studies end up reinforcing the sceptics’ position and further hamper-
ing environmentalist efforts? One of our responses to these objections has
36 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

been to insist on the importance of refusing stereotypes and counterbal-

ancing political polarization. Rather than immediately dismissing
“deniers” or “negationnists,” we examine the many political positions
taken by climate change sceptics in different countries at different times,
the different cultural lenses used by sceptics to appeal to different publics,
and the tropes and modes used in climate sceptic texts. We posit that
such pluralisation opens up a space for dialogue about multi-pronged pol-
icies that are not reduced to being “environmentalist” or not. In my chap-
ter of the book, I examine contemporary novels such as Jo€el Baqu
e’s La
Fonte des glaces, Iegor Gran’s L’
ecologie en bas de chez moi, Philippe
Vasset’s Journal intime d’une pr
edatrice, Augustin Guilbert-Billetdoux’s La
messie du people chauve52 to illustrate the role of irony, satire and at times
outrageous irreverence to portray climate change issues. By evoking alter-
native affects and emotions, these literary texts, too, have a role to play in
climate change debates (see also Nicole Seymour’s recent book Bad
Environmentalism53 that very much complicates the idea of ecocriticism
as searching for the “right” environmentalist texts, that is, the sincere, sci-
entifically-based, realist portraits of climate change effects).
An ecocritical political orientation also very much informs my teach-
ing. First, I continue to insist on the role of literature more generally as a
laboratory for imagining alternative presents and futures, for marking
grief and mourning but also impossible utopias and joys. Shifting away
from traditional literary analysis in my classes allows for students from
mechanical engineering, business management, and hydrological sciences,
to name a few, to construct the eco-politics of the text. The group setting
brings different disciplinary perspectives to bear on the novels and neces-
sarily “inter-disciplinizes” the analysis of the text. Second, I aim to demys-
tify the position of the professor as the conveyer of knowledge and to
create a space of negotiation and exchange in which students can discuss
their life stories and lived experiences. I emphasize that knowledge is
embodied which means moving class outdoors at least once or twice a
semester in order to examine how different environments facilitate or
impede kinds of learning. How is the print book read aloud outdoors in a
group vs. read alone on a screen in a windowless room? Can both read-
ings be ecological and eco-political? Can both aspire to bring the text
alive? In this way, an ecopolitical reading actively promotes conditions in
which a text can evolve and adapt to different environmental and eco-
nomic pressures. While a diversity of textual forms, genres, modes and
materials would lead to the greatest possibility of survival, it might also
be necessary to envision, as I stated earlier, the end of the literary text. As
many works of speculative fiction show, such an extinction would not
mean the end of all creative practices but would rather leave matter to
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 37

tell its own stories (see Claire Colebrook’s introduction “Framing the End
of the Species” to her book The Death of the PostHuman54).
I would prefer, though, to avoid ending on extinction. Instead, I will
circle back to your question about activism that clearly contains the word
“act” and is meant to refer to direct, political action. Community garden-
ing, composting, walking, biking, voting, volunteering at a refugee shelter,
reusing and recycling, are all part of the eco-practices in my own life. But
I think it’s important to place eco-activism within the larger sphere of
practicing interaction as a way to decenter the self and better imagine a
relational ontology. Moreover, the idea of “in-action” is hidden in the
word “in-ter-action.” It corresponds in my mind to those moments of
waiting, stillness, stopping, rest, and boredom that are also key to an eco-
politics. So much time is spent “actively” and “productively” constructing
new ways of becoming and storying—all extremely important endeav-
ours—but stopping, sleep, and rest are no less part of experiencing
embodiment. Coming to terms with other temporalities that percolate,
drift, and interrupt is a way of countering the emphasis on constant
researching, publishing, conferencing, teaching, supervising, mentoring,
learning, striving, and doing, even within ecocriticism. In-actions or alter-
actions like sleep predate consumer capitalism and are shared across
many different species. They are difficult to commercialize (even if capit-
alist economies have done their best to make sleep as “optimal” as pos-
sible in order to increase daily productivity) and they remind us that our
bodies are vulnerable. To conclude, I would propose overlaying the con-
cept of frontiers with that of limits, those that our bodies experience, that
we attend to when caring for others, and that lead us to adopt a humbler
attitude towards the creatures and habitats we depend upon for life.

Notes
1. “De la vie dans la vie: sur une
etrange opposition entre z^o^e et bios.”
Labyrinthe, vol. 22, no. 3, 2005. http://journals.openedition.org/labyrinthe/
1033 ; DOI : 10.4000/labyrinthe.1033.
2. “L’Animal et le dieu: deux modeles pour l’homme. Remarques pouvant
servir a comprendre l’invention de l’animal.” L’Animal dans l’Antiquit
e,
edited by Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey, Vrin, 1997, pp. 157–180.
3. Voir Isabelle Stengers, R
esister au d
esastre, Wildproject, 2019, et Virginie
Maris, La Part sauvage du monde. Penser la nature dans l’Anthropocene,
Paris, Seuil, 2018.


4. Voir Baptiste Lanaspeze, “L’Ecologie fait des r
ecits” (interview with
Christine Marcandier and Jean-Christophe Cavallin). Diacritik, March 2019.
https://diacritik.com/2019/03/19/baptiste-lanaspeze-wildproject-lecologie-fait-
des-recits/.
5. Bruno Latour, O u atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, Paris, La
D
ecouverte, 2017.
38 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

6. Je d
eveloppe cette question dans Proust ou le r
eel retrouv
e. Le sensible et son

expression dans A  la recherche du temps perdu ([2000] Paris,
Champion, 2018).
7. I will not delve into the differences between
ecocritique and these other eco-
and geo- approaches here since I have already done so elsewhere. But I do
want to point out, as Anne does a little later with respect to zoopo
etique,
that these approaches may intersect but do not encompass each other:
g
eocritique brings together geography, travel writing and post-colonial
perspectives whereas g
eopo
etique emerges from Kenneth White’s philosophy
and creative engagements with place. As for
ecopo
etique, its meaning has
evolved quite a bit within the French intellectual sphere: from a more
interdisciplinary definition of various artistic forms of “making with
environment” (Nathalie Blanc, Denis Chartier and Thomas Pughe,


“Litt
erature et
ecologie: vers une
ecopo
etique,” Ecologie & Politique, no. 36,
2008, pp. 15–28) to a more strictly literary understanding of genre, style,
and poetics (Pierre Schoentjes, Ce qui a lieu: Essai d’
ecopo
etique,
Wildproject, 2015).
8. See 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.
9. See Lucas Hollister, “The Green and the Black: Ecological Awareness and
the Darkness of Noir,” PMLA, vol. 134, no. 5, October 2019, pp. 1012–1027.
10. In my 2003 doctoral thesis, La Nature et l’
ecologie chez L
evi-Strauss,
Tournier, Serres, I walk carefully through the influence of structuralist
thought on the
eco-pens
ee of these three thinkers central to twentieth-
century French thought. In (a much too brief) response to your question
about intellectual heritages, there has clearly been different approaches to
decentring the human, but they have not always been paired with an
ecological emphasis on interrelatedness, interdependency, and habitat.
11. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, Duke
UP, 2016.
12. Serenella Iovino and Serpel Opperman, editors, Material Ecocriticism,
Indiana UP, 2014.


13. French Ecocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction
Ecologically, U of Toronto P, 2017.
14. Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse,
Paris, La D
ecouverte, 2019.


15. L’Eco-pouvoir: Environnements et politique, Paris, La D
ecouverte, 1994.
16. See Bruno Latour’s O u atterrir?
17. See Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel, nouvelle
edition, Paris, Flammarion,
2020, Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard UP, 2004, and Isabelle
Stengers Cosmopolitiques I. La Guerre des sciences. L’Invention de la
m
ecanique: pouvoir et raison. Thermodynamique: la r
ealit
e physique en crise,
Paris, La D
ecouverte, 2003.
18. Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry, Lexington Books, 2014.


19. “Is Ecocritique Still Possible?” French Studies, vol. 73, no. 4, October 2019,
pp. 598–616. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knz232.
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 39

20. Louisa Mackenzie and Stephanie Postumus, editors, French Thinking About
Animals, Michigan State UP, 2015.
21. Le Silence des b^etes: La philosophie a l’
epreuve de l’animalit
e, Paris,
Seuil, 1998.
22. Voir https://animots.hypotheses.org/seminaire-animots/animalitterature-
2007-2010.
23. https://animots.hypotheses.org/28.
24. https://animots.hypotheses.org/anr-2010-2014.
25. Voir Anne-Rachel Hermetet and Stephanie Posthumus, editors, “Ecological
In(ter)ventions in the Francophone World,” Ecozon@: European Journal of
Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 10, no. 2, 2019.
26. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Ecology, and the Environment, U of
Virginia P, 2003.
27. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America, Oxford
UP, 2003.
28. Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody, George B. Handley and Stephanie
Posthumus, Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis,
Bloomsbury, 2019.
29. Pour un d
eveloppement, je me permets de renvoyer a mon article “De la
l
egitimation d’un corpus zoopo
etique a l’
etablissement d’un canon” (in
Batailles autour du canon, edited by Guillaume Bridet, Editions

universitaires de Dijon, forthcoming 2022).
30. Projets en cours de d
ep^ ot Man/Animal/Machine Liminalities, port
e par


Cristina Alvares, et Hunting fictions : hunting as motif and metaphor in
Portuguese literature, port
e par M
arcia Neves.
31. McClelland and Stewart, 2003.
32. See Ursula Heise, “Comparative Literature and the Environmental
Humanities.” ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline, 2015, https://
stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/comparative-literature-and-environmental-
humanities, “Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in
Ecocriticism,” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 3, May 2013, pp. 636–643, and Sense of
Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Oxford
UP, 2008.
33. Habiter, Paris, Le Pommier, 2011, p. 53.
34. See Natasha Kanap
e Fontaine, Manifeste Assi, Montr
eal, M
emoire d’encrier,
2014 and Audr
ee Wilhelmy, Blanc R
esine, Montr
eal, Lem
eac, 2019.
35. Paris, P.O.L., 2017.
36. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding, Inaction and
Opportunity, Cambridge UP, 2009.
37. Voir Anne Simon, “La Vermine dans les plis de nos villes” (“R
eenchanter le
sauvage urbain,” Universit
e Via Domitia, Perpignan, June 14 2019. https://
ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/3051).
38. I am not dismissing the violence that has been done by maintaining
nationalist literary traditions, but rather am hoping for new spaces of
inquiry within the university that are organized around concepts and
research questions. For a more in-depth engagement with the violence of
national literary traditions, see Audrey Lasserre’s article “Qu’est-ce qu’une


histoire de la litt
erature française ?” (La France des
ecrivains: Eclats d’un
mythe (1945–2005), edited by Marie-Odile Andr
e, Marc Dambre and Michel
P. Schmitt, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2011, pp. 207–217) and
40 L. HOLLISTER ET AL.

the more recent critique of literary nationalism in Alexandre Gefen, Oana

Panaït
e and Cornelia Ruhe’s Avant-propos to the 2019 Fixxion issue on
“Fictions ‘françaises’” (Fixxion: Revue Critique de Fixxion Française
Contemporaine. No. 19, 2019, http://www.revue-critique-de-fixxion-
francaise-contemporaine.org/rcffc/article/view/fx%2019.01).
39. For an example of a short story I have recently published, see “Thus—
Imagining Alternative Futures with Cancer” (Alienocene. Journal of the First
Outernational, March 1 2019, https://alienocene.com/2019/03/01/thus-
imagining-alternative-futures-with-cancer/).
40. Stephanie Posthumus and St
efan Sinclair, “L’inscription de la nature et de la
technologie dans La Possibilit
e d’une ^ıle de Michel Houellebecq,” Sites:
Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, vol. 15, issue 3, 2011, pp. 349–356.
41. U of Minnesota P, 2019.
42. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture, Harvard UP, 1995.
43. See Atwood, Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis, Guild American Books, 1989, N.K.
Jemisin, The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky (Orbit, 2015, 2016,
2017), Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice, Orbit Books, 2013, Naomi Alderman, The
Power, Viking, 2016, and Lauren Beukes, Zoo City, Angry Robot, 2010.
44. See Julianna Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, U of California
P, 2005, Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver,
Harcourt Brace, 1968, Jos
e Saramago, The Lives of Things, translated by
Giovanni Pontiero, Verso, 2012, and Renato Rosaldo, The Day of Shelly’s
Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Duke UP, 2013.
45. Voir Christine D
etrez et Anne Simon, A  leur corps d
efendant: Les femmes a
l’
epreuve du nouvel ordre moral, Paris, Seuil, 2006.
46. “Noms d’oiseaux,” En attendant Nadeau, Hors-s
erie n 3 (“B^etises”), edited
by Pascal Engel, summer 2018, pp. 14–18, https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.
fr/2018/07/17/noms-oiseaux-betise/.
47. Voir le diaporama sonore “Hybrides humains/animaux
eph
emeres dans le street
art” (Marion Dupuis, with the help of Simon Garrette, V
eronique Lorin et
Ann-Koulmig Renault, in Animots: Carnet de Zoopo
etique, 2019, https://animots.
hypotheses.org/10115) et “Mots/Animaux : randonn
ee en bibliotheque avec
Anne Simon” (EHESS_Podcasts, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/user-897145586/
motsanimaux-randonnee-en-bibliotheque-avec-anne-simon).
48.

See my 2019 article “Is Ecocritique Still Possible?” See also the recent call for
papers for an issue of Fabula-LhT on “Litt
erature(s) pour des temps extr^emes”
that advocates for an “
ecologie litt
eraire qui prendrait pour objet les interactions
entre th
eorie litt
eraire, production des textes et souci du terrestre” (Jean-
Christophe Cavallin and Alain Romestaing, Fabula-LhT, January 16 2020,
https://www.fabula.org/actualites/fabula-lht-nouveaux-enjeux-de-l-ecopoetique-
contemporaine-vers-une-ecologie-litteraire_94500.php).
49. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable, U of Chicago P, 2016.
50. Random House, 2010.
51. HarperCollins, 2004.
52.

See Baqu
e, Iegor Gran, L’Ecologie en bas de chez moi, Paris, P.O.L., 2011,
Philippe Vasset, Journal intime d’une pr
edatrice, Paris, Fayard, 2010, and
Augustin Guilbert-Billetdoux, La Messie du peuple chauve, Paris,
Gallimard, 2012.
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 41

53. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, U of

Minnesota P, 2018.
54. Open Humanities P, 2014.

Works Cited


Blanc, Guillaume, Elise Demeulenaere and Wolf Feuerhahn, editors. Humanit
es
environnementales: Enqu^etes et contre-enqu^etes. Paris, Publications de la
Sorbonne, 2017.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Wiley, 2013.
Coste, Florent. Explore: Investigations litt
eraires. Paris, Questions Th
eoriques,
2017.
Proust, Marcel. A  la recherche du temps perdu, tome IV. Edited by Jean-Yves
Tadi
e, Paris, Gallimard, 1989.

Notes on Contributors
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.
Stephanie Posthumus is Professor of comparative literature at McGill University,
and she has been developing an ecocritical approach to the many diverse forms
of the non-human in contemporary literature and philosophy. She is the author


of French Ecocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction
Ecologically (2017) and co-editor of the essay collection French Thinking about
Animals (2015) and French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the
Twenty-First Century (2017). She is currently researching the circulation of plants
in contemporary literature written in French (for more information, see https://
imaginairebotanique.uqam.ca/).


Anne Simon is Research Director at the CNRS and affiliated faculty at the Ecole


des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where she oversees the P^ ole
Proust and the zoopoetics research program “Animots.” She has codirected spe-
cial issues of Esprit cr
eateur (2011), Contemporary French and Francophone
Studies (2012), Fixxion (2015), and Revue des Sciences humaines (2017) on
Animal Studies and Ecopoetics. She is the author of four books on Proust, of an
essay on gender (with Christine D
etrez), and of an essay on zoopoetics (Une b^ete
entre les lignes, Wildproject, 2021).
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