Session: 1i
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Sara Bédard-Goulet
Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles (University of Paris 8), “When ‘Historicized Nature’ Strikes Back: Haunted Ecohorror in the Anthropocene”
Abstract: In his 2017 essay entitled The Progress of This Storm, Swedish social geographer Andreas Malm describes the contemporary climate crisis in the following terms :
The nature that is knocking on the door of the postmodern condition (…) is something of a spectral creature, for it is carried forward by a human past. [M]ore than the revenge of nature, this is the revenge of historicity dressed in nature. The larger the cumulative emissions of CO2, the more uncontrollable the storm; the more society has intruded and intrudes on nature, the more nature invades society with a haunted army whose early incursions are now felt. (77)
Two years earlier, Indian novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh reflected on “the freakish events weather of today” with a strikingly similar metaphor : “They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms.” (The Great Derangement, 32). Drawing on a range of literary and cinematographic fictions — including Rachel Carson’s “Fable for tomorrow” (1962), Helon Habila’s Oil on water (2010), Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012), Samantha Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate (2014) and Mariana Enríquez “Bajo el agua negra” (2016) — I seek to foreground a mode of ecohorror in which the natural antagonists striking back are explicitly framed as what Malm calls “historicized nature”.
I will first argue that these works, which update the gothic motif of haunting through their depictions of nature’s upheavals, unsettle the human/nature dualism. They achieve this not only by staging threats that prove to be natural-cultural hybrids, but also by foregrounding ecological vulnerabilities that cut across species boundaries. In contrast to Simon C. Estok’s contention that ecophobic cultural representations foster hatred and hostility toward nature, I will demonstrate that these works convey both fear of and fear for nature — whereas the insistence on highlighting unequal states of exposure among humans themselves enables them to further shift the traditional battle lines of “man versus nature”.
Finally, I will conclude with some remarks on the generic diversity of this corpus — most notably the evolution from Carson’s speculative fiction in 1962’s to Barry Levinson’s mockumentary sixty years later — which I read as symptomatic of the contemporary rise of horror as a realist mode in the Gothic Anthropocene.
Bio: Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 8. She earned her PhD in 2018 with a dissertation on the emergence of a non-anthropocentric narrative poetics within the Western literary tradition since the late 19th century. Her current research investigates the theoretical, poetic and political intersections between literature and ecological knowledge and imaginaries, with a particular focus on ecohorror and phobic representations of nature.
Dace Bula (University of Latvia), “Sand versus People: Contested Agencies in Aberts Bels’ People in Boats”
Abstract: The paper examines a novel that belongs to the Latvian literary eco-awakening of the 1970s and 1980s, which involved creative endeavors to speak for nature, challenge the human-centered worldview, and represent nonhuman subjectivities. Alberts Bel’s People in Boats (1987), in this context, stands out as an early work to draw on bidirectional agency across the culture—nature border. It is a fictional history of an imagined village on the Curonian Spit in the territory of contemporary Lithuania, inhabited by a Latvian ethnic group known as Kursenieki. The novel’s events take place in the mid-19th century and are grounded in the historical reality of the Kursenieki assimilation into Lithuanians and Germans. The novel also draws on the geographical fact that Curonian Spit is known as the longest mobile dune chain in Europe. The backbone of its storyline is the agency of an unstoppable, massive dune, initially threatening and ultimately burying the village under sand. However, the author has not intended to demonize nature, as these are people who are responsible for setting the dune in motion by hewing down the forest that secures the sand. The community ceases to exist as people get scattered in their search for new homes. Warning about the ecological dangers of losing knowledge of how to coexist with nature, Bel’s novel is counted as “one of the most beautiful and at the same time saddest books” in Latvian literature. Published in the late 1980s, it rode the rising wave of not only national (or rather, glasnost-inspired anticolonial) but also an ecological awakening and caused a heated reaction in which environmental issues at times took precedence over other aspects.
Bio: I am a leading researcher in environmental humanities and ecocriticism at the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art (University of Latvia). I focus on human—environment relationships as represented in both oral and written culture. My recent research activities have included studying environmental experience stories and solastalgia in industrial suburbs, which have resulted in an edited volume titled Living Next to the Port (2022). In 2024, I published a monograph, Literary Naturecultures: An Ecocritical Reading of Regīna Ezera Zoo-prose.
Susan Meyer (North-West University), “Forces of Nature versus Those of Man in Bundu (Chris Barnard)”
Abstract: In a place near Mozambique where no one knows the boundary, drought is changing everything. Tens, then hundreds of people seek refuge in a forgotten outpost where a clinic is run by lonely souls of uncertain training, nuns staunchly determined to serve. But the inundation soon becomes too much for them, and there is no help from outside. Within the small community of outcasts a plan takes shape that is as outrageous as it is inspiring.
In the South African author Chris Barnard’s Afrikaans novel Boendoe, originally published in 1999 and translated by Michiel Heyns, the relationship between man and nature is framed in terms of conflict and antagonism. This paper investigates the depiction of the intensity of the characters’ reaction to environmental crises and nature forces in Barnard’s novel. Evidence of the traumatic effects of nature disaster on man’s body and mind are found: the loss of all certainties, compassion fatigue, the degradation of social and communication skills and disillusionment regarding the inability to create and maintain meaningful relationships. When nature rises up to take revenge on humanity events lead to physical as well as psychological exhaustion in the characters in Bundu.
Theories from the field of psychology are applied in this paper to conjoin the experiences of characters and individual narratives with the general, human inclination to indicate relevance within the reader’s life. Theoretical perspectives of Figly, Ehrenreich and Huggard on PTSS (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) as well as on social and emotional alienation in ordinary life contribute to meaningful interpretations of aspects in Budu. Barnard’s novel demonstrates the struggle between man and nature raging on by means of destructive processes and leading to some new perspectives on man-human-coexistence. My research of Bundu focusses on the people and the animals of Africa at the height of their beauty and the depth of their despair. It is a meditation on the mystery of our powers and the limitations that we share with our brothers, the animals
Bio: Susan Meyer is Associate Professor in Afrikaans at the North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. She forms part of the Research Unit Languages and Literature in the South African context in the Faculty Humanities. Her aims are the development of the Afrikaans ecocritical discourse in South Africa, ecocritical analysis of Afrikaans literature, and a contribution to the expansion of ecocritical studies to the eco-oriented world wider than the one dominated by Anglophone literatures. Her research highlights the diverse and convincing contributions of Afrikaans ecocriticism to the predominant ecocritical voice of English South-African ecocritics.
Pilar Andrade Boué (Complutense University of Madrid), “Animal Activism and Rebellion in French-Language Fiction: The Case of La révolte de Gaïa by J. W. Brasseur”
Abstract: French-language literature has proposed novelistic plots in which humans take action in defense of animals. However, there are fewer cases in which animals themselves take action in response to human abuses, in rebellion or revenge. In this presentation, we propose to analyze one of the contemporary books on this subject, whose protagonists are animals, neither anthropomorphized nor taken as allegories or metaphors. The novel is La révolte de Gaïa, written by J.W. Brasseur and published in 2023 by Maïa Editions. The author explores the possibility of a planetary revolution led by animals against humans, combining fictional events of rebellion with shocking real data that motivates them, encouraging the reader to identify with the animals in their violent actions. The narrative tension leads from isolated acts to simultaneous scenes across the planet, which ultimately force humanity to become aware. All existing spaces of violence against animals are mentioned (a cattle macro-farm, a pig slaughterhouse, an Asian wet market, a pharmacological laboratory for animal experimentation, a zoo, an ocean, a circus, a hunting reserve, a bullring, etc.), and in them the animals choose human mediators to convey their demands. The progression of the plot is accompanied by a progression of ideas: moral considerations (especially environmental justice), philosophical considerations (pathocentrism), scientific considerations (Lovelock’s Gaia theory), and even religious-spiritual considerations (intelligent planetary consciousness) are explored. The book proposes an interesting and hopeful ending in which, after the planetary chaos caused by the animal rebellion, a “new balance” emerges in which respectful cohabitation and interspecies interaction form the basis of human communities.
Bio: Pilar Andrade Boué holds a PhD in French Philology and is a tenured professor in the Department of Romance Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her current research focuses on ecocriticism: theory, text analysis, ecological and environmental themes, disaster literature, and zoopoetics. Her latest publications are (in Spanish) The hundred Environmentalisms. An Introduction to Environmental Thought (with Ignacio Quintanilla, 2023), Studies in Zoopoetics: The Animal Question in Literature (Peter Lang, 2024), ‘New Trends in Environmental Collapse Literature’ (Theory now. Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought, 2024), and ‘Environmental Crisis and Romantic Naturphilosophie in the Literary Work of Hélène Grimaud’ (Thélème 2024). He is a member of the GIECO Ecocriticism Research Group.