On the other hand, the world of culture, and the world of literature in particular, can provide and therefore help to build another conversation about our relationship with the planet. Poetic language, in particular, can convey feelings and images into language that cannot pass through rational language. Similarly, if fictional stories, by creating a universe in which the reader can imagine themselves, do not shy away from evoking ecological disasters, they often accompany them on a human journey that inspires energy and goodwill. Many stories create chilling apocalyptic worlds, but others also reveal paths of individual and collective resilience that give the public insight.
Our conference will bring researchers from different countries together to reflect on our productions and their developments. Our aim will be to examine the question of representations of the ecological crisis “between the end of the world and suffering” from different literary angles, in a relatively firm perspective both at a historical and global level. Children’s literature, through its educational and civic aims, will be an integral part of the project. We will pay special attention to the question below:
1. Its stylistic aspect: what words and images to represent the environment, the relationship of men and women to the world around them? How do we express the effect that the depression causes?
2. Its general aspect of determining the preferred literary genres that integrate environmental questions (poetry, literary journeys, science fiction, dystopia, etc.) in the words and statement of these questions (the question of the environment is – it is a statement. a frame, a poem?
3. Its actancial aspect to indicate the treatment of the characters (what role is given to the characters? Are they active or passive in the face of the event; what kind of characters or living beings are represented) ;
4. Does the reception, through its literary effects and the processes implemented, favor a sense of urgency or fear or does it create (in what way?) a movement?
This conference will be the starting point for a series of meetings and collaborations that will last over the entire year 2024-2025. They bring together researchers in literature, human sciences (sociologists, anthropologists, linguists) and scientists in collaboration with Biolab Néméton, Grenoble’s association for scientific popularization and mediation. It will be accompanied by writing workshops open specifically to UGA students in a research-creation approach, to participate in the development of imaginations capable of thinking about climate change without necessarily be dystopian.
Bibliography tracks
Even though Ronsard already attacked the 16th century, in a famous elegy, the loggers cutting down the Gastine forest, it was at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st that there was a sense of human influence on the environment. Authors use it in their works to express their feelings, the revolution and to call for the revival of citizens.
Criticism has focused on the analysis of this topic since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, where the development of ecopoetics – especially related to the textualization of stories – (Schoentjes 2015, Posthumus 2016) and ed. -criticism, – more politically involved and richer with the perspective of other subjects – (Buell 1995, Iovino 2006, Suberchicot 2012) has joined a more accurate search for the harmful effects of human development and giving the manifest the concept of Anthropocene. The research of N. Scaffai (2018) brings this question to the heart of the poet’s language whose images and figures allow to express a person’s relationship with his world that was not expected. In the narrative field, the collective work led by C. Salabé (2013), for example, highlights the idea of a “material place” (luogo materiale) at the heart of the natural ecosystem as well on literary imagination. This idea is also at the heart of X. Garnier’s research (2022) on African literature where ecopoetics is accompanied by the rejection of economic exploitation. At the same time, pop culture (Chelebourg 2012) and especially children’s literature (Prince and Thiltges 2018) have also been the subject of research from this perspective: the Literature and Ecology of Youth conference held at the University showed Grenoble-Alpes in 2022. the importance of the power of children in works where they were actors, rich in group, against adults often presented as passive.
In 2021, the magazine Skeul-LhT reflected on a “literary ecology” that culminated in a special online issue, Ecopoetics for exceptional times in which Jean-Christophe Cavallin recalled how quickly he wanted literary communication to “appeal in praxis”, calling like Jean-Paul Sartre for “a literature of real situations. » (Situations of the writer in 1947). So he asked researchers to “think together about the political axis and the poetic axis – a regime of orders and a regime of description. »
This conference aims to position itself in this perspective by questioning representations of ecological disaster and resilience that may exist in French or international poetic and narrative literature. . The organizers are interested in all communications on literary works (French or international), both for young people and adults, that convey an environmental message, from a stylistic or narrative point of view.
2024-04-17 06:04:44
#Literature #ecology #world #suffering #Grenoble
