Les écofictions: mythologies de la fin du monde by Christian Chelebourg (review)

Reviews 259 and then entertains some academic hand-wringing about how this scientific advance threatens humanistic culture. The bulk of what follows will then demonstrate how artists, contemporary and from earlier eras, have already imagined or used this aspect of science in their literary works. In terms of artistic sources, Chassay is not limited to the Francophone world; he draws his examples from the literature of Europe (East and West), and the Americas. For those already open to a healthy interchange between the sciences and the arts, the arguments made may not seem terribly new, but what provides them with a renewed vitality,is Chassay’s relaxed,often ironic style.He is something of a provocateur, but one who knows what he is talking about. Thus a sentence like “au Moyen Âge, les populations avaient une mémoire beaucoup plus importante que la nôtre” (114) might initially raise some eyebrows, but, as a variety of scholars have demonstrated, it is quite true. Throughout this collection Chassay confronts complacent lieux communs with facts and this is nowhere more evident than in his rebuttal of the regularly announced death of literature. Chassay scoffs at this notion and suggests instead that if literature suffers, it is from a plethora of themes and possibilities, many of them provided by recent advances in scientific exploration. For example, as he shows at considerable length, the computer has inspired contemporary writers and created a new interest in artists from earlier eras who had proposed something comparable in their texts. Perhaps more than any single argument in this volume, La littérature à l’éprouvette reminds us that the literary imagination has the potential for drawing inspiration from all sources, including those often considered to be totally opposed to the artistic enterprise. Florida State University William Cloonan Chelebourg, Christian. Les écofictions: mythologies de la fin du monde. Clamecy: Impressions Nouvelles, 2012. ISBN 978-2-87449-140-5. Pp. 256. 19,50 a. This book is an authoritative and wide-ranging study of the eco-fictional imagination in over two hundred works of popular fiction and cinema. Although many of the works that Chelebourg analyzes appear in English and are American in origin, the book uses French literature and criticism (Bachelard, Deleuze, Durand, Voltaire, Rousseau, Camus, Rufin, to name just a few) in its analysis of how industrialized Western societies confront the threat of nuclear holocaust, global warming, climate change, rampant disease, and general environmental degradation through the stories they tell. As Chelebourg points out, while he may not be able to validate or debunk current scientific or religious theories concerning the environmental future of the planet, his book can and does lead to a better understanding of the discourse of environmental catastrophe as a cultural phenomenon. Chelebourg shows that eco-fiction follows a classical narrative scheme which can end happily or in disaster,according to the decisions made by the protagonists. While eco-criticism in the American academy was at first associated with the study of so-called‘nature writing,’ as the celebration of the natural world (by writers like Thoreau or Annie Dillard, for example), Chelebourg shows that eco-fiction also contains what he calls a “réalisme panique, une angoisse de l’avenir qui vient opposer la ‘réalité’ présente de la planète à l’idéal lénifiant entretenu par la contemplation de sa beauté” (10). Chelebourg isolates a strain of narratives that belong to an ‘heuristics of fear’ whereby a disastrous future is made present so that the imagination can confront and possibly master its terrible chaos. Hence, eco-fiction is akin to science fiction because it tends to mix scientific foresight with prophetic prediction (10). However, eco-fiction can also include realist narratives like documentary films. To cite one notable example,Chelebourg examines the portrayal of Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim. Here, the circulation and reception of information regarding climate change is compared to hand-to-hand combat in the ring of public opinion. Chelebourg thus shows that climate change “relève du storytelling ” (72) in that the film links the story of environmental degradation with that of Gore’s defeat in the 2000 presidential election. Nevertheless...