French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century ed. by Daniel A. Finch-Race and Stephanie Posthumus (review)
- French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century ed. by Daniel A. Finch-Race and Stephanie Posthumus
Working collectively 'to diversify ecocriticism', still marred by 'linguistic homogeneity' (which is to say, anglophonocentrism; p. 10), the chronologically organized contributions of this volume experiment with diverse constellations of primary texts, questions, and theory. Jeff Persels asks to what extent 'contemporaries consider[ed] the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) in environmental terms' (p. 25), a question explored via several principum specula. Pauline Goul reads Montaigne as 'an environmental writer' (p. 44) and as a thinker of pre-sustainability, offering productive new readings of the essayist's New World chapters. Karen F. Quandt's thorough chapter traces how Hugo's conceptualizing of nature evolves after his arrival on the island of Jersey and how that evolution marks, too, Les Misérables. Claire Nettleton rereads Zola's Thérèse Raquin, asking if the Seine might be, more than a backdrop to murder, 'actually a river', and, further, if Zola's desire to 'chercher […] la bête' in these murderers might point to a 'non-anthropocentric aesthetic' (p. 82). Daniel A. Finch-Race reads sixteen-year-old Rimbaud as an 'ecopoet' whose verse articulates 'correspondences between ecological circumstances and shifts in cultural production' (p. 100), via microlectures of 'Sensation' and 'Ma Bohème'. David E. Evans draws our attention to the vers libres of the much-overlooked poet, Marie Krysinska, to suggest that formal play (not content) re-enchants 'our relationship with the natural world' (p. 120), while articulating the 'alluring unknowability' thereof (p. 122). Te ofilo Sanz builds on his own earlier work on Marguerite Yourcenar's ecological engagement, here offering a reading of Un homme obscur, claimed to give 'a voice to other earthlings and the environment' (p. 138). Christopher Watkin's chapter on Michel Serres is particularly rewarding: to earlier studies (notably An Ecology of Knowledge: Michel Serres, ed. by Sydney Lévy, special issue of SubStance, 26.2 (1997)) on the philosopher's (complex) relationship to ecocriticism and ecology (both words he avoids) and to Stephanie Posthumus's research, Watkin brings an emphasis on Serres's recent works to trace out 'the inextricability' of restricted and general ecologies. Jonathan Krell draws on Luc Bureau's Terra erotica (2009) to read Stéphane Audeguy's La Théorie des nuages (2005), in which a fictional meteorologist's cloud-mapping project morphs into a catalogue of female genitalia. Nikolaj Lübecker brings Jean-Claude Rousseau's film La Vallée close (1995) into ecocritical perspective, especially via Gilbert Simondon's concept of the individu–milieu. Anaïs Boulard discusses post-apocalyptic novels by Éric Chevillard and Michel Houellebecq. Her emphasis on how [End Page 151] both authors foreground not environmental catastrophe but the murkier pre- and post-moments is valuable, but the subsequent hypothesis about a French exception — these novels are 'less straightforward, and more open to the imagination' (p. 225) than non-French ones — is unrewarding. Hannes De Vriese reads Sylvain Tesson's Dans les forêts de Sibérie (2011), an account of the author's six-month retreat spent in a Siberian cabin. Comparing the work to Thoreau's Walden, De Vriese refuses the book's 'discrepancies and dissonances' (p. 245), which seems to miss the point. The final chapter, by Posthumus, is a thoughtful essay that enquires into the possibility (and dangers) of positing the emergence of a specifically 'French écocritique' (p. 254). Although certain chapters are more compelling than others, for anyone involved in the environmental humanities from a French perspective this volume is essential reading.
