Imagining, writing and reading possible futures

Which book would you take with you on your climate exile? Or, more seriously, in what ways do the human sciences, and literary disciplines in particular, take up the issues surrounding the environment, the ecological crisis and sustainability? How can the study of literature help us to take stock of the social and symbolic dimensions of the relationship between human beings and their natural environment? Can fictional narratives heal, if not alleviate, solastalgia, the nostalgic distress we feel in the face of the planet’s mutations, the feeling at the root of eco-anxiety, the new malady of the century? In other words, can poetry save the world?

These questions are at the heart of the public course 2022 of the Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures (CIEL), organized in partnership with the Centre de compétences en durabilité (CCD) of the University of Lausanne. Alongside this course entitled “Durabilittérature”, we offer a selection of eco-literary works, sustainable narratives and studies marking out recent fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. Discover this thematic selection in the Renouvaud catalog, as well as the physical exhibition on the Unithèque site from September 26 to October 7, 2022.

Narratives and imaginaries of sustainability

The launch, in 2019, of the Centre compétences en durabilité (CCD), aimed at developing interdisciplinarity and establishing the University of Lausanne as a pioneer in sustainability, coincided with the formulation of nine building sites to be invested by Faculties and researchers∙euses. Under the leadership of the academic collection of geography and sustainability/human ecology, we have seized upon these projects as reservoirs to enhance the documentary resources available on the library’s physical and virtual shelves. Making these resources available is also what is required by the first of the areas identified by the CCD, “Narratives and Imaginaries”, which has yet to be fully explored by researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Creative, teaching and research initiatives do exist, and they multiply every year, but they lacked a common place of expression and deployment.

This is what the Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures (CIEL) aims to offer, as it has been accustomed from the outset to crossing viewpoints and approaches. Its entire 2022-2023 program has been designed from an eco-literary perspective. As a priority, the public course aims to highlight alternative and habitable narratives, capable of renewing imaginations of possible futures and the relationship between human beings and nature in order, on the one hand, to encourage support for ecological transition measures, and, on the other, to extricate ourselves from an apocalyptic torpor.

In Après le monde (2020), Antoinette Rychner evokes other ways of inhabiting the world and building community and society beyond the collapse. In a more meditative tone, Anne-Sophie Subilia – who will share the stage with Blaise Hofmann during a literary evening organized at La Datcha on November 9, 2022 – asks how to remain human∙e, both individually and collectively, in the hostile nature of Neiges intérieures (2020). These two contemporary novels, among others, belong to a literature of fiction that represents

an imagination designed to build new links with the world, which humans are not alone in occupying. […] At a time when human action is posing unprecedented threats to life on Earth, novels have a role to play in the search for a new balance. [Barontini/Schoentjes 2022: 104]

They also attest to a “heightened awareness of the disruption to the biosphere’s equilibrium caused by human action” [Barontini/Schoentjes 2022: 96], and bring into play the idea of the “Anthropocene”.

From linguistic geography to ecopoetics

It’s this kind of playfulness that characterizes the eco-literary production of the last thirty years, fueled by a movement to popularize the ecological cause and the feeling of being on the cusp of extreme times. The website Literature.greenpowered by Ghent University, reports on the richness and diversity of this production, as does the Prix du Roman d’Écologie (PRÉ), which since 2018 has crowned a∙e French-speaking author∙trice of fiction traversed by ecological issues. However, these questions are not posed in the same terms depending on the spaces – geographical, cultural, linguistic and generic – in which they are born. Thus, postcolonial (or decolonial) and/or feminist writing are not driven by the same struggles, as they are inscribed in environments made up of different interconnections.

If space is essential to the study of ecofiction, so too is time, and literature hasn’t waited for the twenty-first century to be attuned to place. Ecocriticism – or ecopoetics for the French-speaking world – certainly makes it possible to revisit ancient corpora in order to write an alternative and complementary literary and cultural history, but we must be wary of describing ancient or medieval texts as ecocritical on pain of anachronism. Conceptual research establishes a filiation between linguistic geography, literary geography and geopoetics, a neologism theorized, among others, by Kenneth White to designate

a transdisciplinary theory-practice applicable to all areas of life and research, aimed at re-establishing and enriching the long-destroyed Man-Earth relationship, with its well-known ecological, psychological and intellectual consequences, thus developing new existential perspectives in a re-founded world.[www.printempsdespoetes.com/Kenneth-White]

Nevertheless, ecology is not required by the field of geopoetics, whereas its representations form the basis of Anglo-Saxon ecocriticism, an approach that began to develop in the 1970s, and of the French-language ecopoetics that stems from it. What distinguishes ecopoetics from ecocriticism, however, is the attention paid to the form and ways in which environmental issues are narrated (rather than to the issues themselves). Ecopoetics is more interested in literature as a verbal art than in the ecological or militant message conveyed by the text.

Repairing water, reviving water

As part of CIEL’s eco-literary program, a scientific symposium will be held at the University of Lausanne from November 9 to 11, 2022. Responding to Olivier Rey’s cry of urgency in Réparer l’eau (2021 ), and because water crystallizes the threats to limited planetary resources, this symposium will compare ways of revive water. In parallel, a writing competition is being launched on this theme, with entries due by October 20, 2022. To your ecopoetic pens!