Regarder à perte de vue et écrire quand même : quelques propositions sur la littérature écologique américaine

Résumé 0

This paper draws from the works of Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Rick Bass and Barry Lopez to outline what an ecological text is. It suggests that what matters is not so much what the text conveys in terms of message, but the way it conveys it—its self-conscious choices of narrative and rhetorical strategies appropriate to a non anthropocentric textual handling of the natural world. It pays close attention to the way in which ecological texts question their own politics of representation through a consistent staging of a crisis in seeing, suggesting how inadequate the human gaze is when seeking to picture nature. It also investigates how ecological texts draw attention to their own language, particularly through their systematic use of incongruous comparisons, not only to point to their own inadequacy in rendering the language of nature, but also to brightly flaunt their rhetorical ethic, displaying an authentic artificiality which keeps the otherness of the non-human world at a respectful distance.