Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mackenzie, Louisa

Titel

It's a Queer Thing: Early Modern French Ecocriticism

Ist Teil von

• French literature series, 2012, Vol.39, p.15

Ort / Verlag

Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]this is more my focus here, it tethers discussion to a kind of binary impasse, where culture is devalued because associated with human activity, and nature is a persecuted other-out-there to be protected. According to the "Great Chain of Being" world view so enduringly described by Lovejoy, human and non-human natures coexisted as part of an intricately connected hierarchy which led all the way up to God. "Theory" became symptomatic of an alienation from, and hence indifference to, the reality of environmental degradation (Buell Environmental, Sagar for a more radical example). [...]in a process that can perhaps be compared to the ongoing debates between Francophone and Anglophone feminists, French thought has been seen in the English world as problematically apolitical, while suspicion towards American pragmatism and "le politiquement correct" endures in France.24 In a recent attempt to put the two in dialogue, Stephanie Posthumus argues that French éco-pensée (her term) "answer(s) some of the questions about ecology, ethics, language, modernity and realism that ecocriticism has been asking since it first emerged" (1). [...]overly-hasty attempts to engage in other disciplines can lead to tokenistic scholarship.40 Why should those of us trained in literary analysis not continue to pay attention to the specificity of what literature does in the cultural and historical realms, with - of course - rigorous awareness of our own "hauntings," positionality and privileges? A more fully humanized ecocriticism, which celebrates the coupling of nature and culture rather than insisting on their separation, would be less inclined to distance itself from textual representation.