Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

This lecture draws on a forthcoming monograph on the role of reenchantment and the resurfacing of the song of the Earth in contemporary environmental fiction, including works by American and European authors Jean Giono, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Pancake, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Leslie Marmon Silko, Starhawk, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others.

Focusing on the braiding of indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies within a Western context, my readings of animistic and totemic dimensions of these works leads to the theorizing of “liminal realism,” a mode of storytelling performed at the edges of scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews. I approach liminal realism through an ecopoetic critical lens, emphasizing how it works a kind of interspecies magic, situating the reader in-between human and other-than-human worlds. In this literature, moreover, language is rematerialized and made sensuous, poetically echoing the biophony and geophony of the Earth’s polyphonic soundscapes, and relaying its textured odorscapes: writing as initiatory ecopoesis, as postmodern shamanism. This form of writing reenchants our rapport with the Earth, promoting a re-recognition of it based on relationships of vital reciprocity and symbiosis, and restoring our capacity for wonder.

About the Speaker

Bénédicte Meillon’s research explores ecopoet(h)ics of reenchantment, focusing mostly on magical realism, mythopoeia, and ecofeminism, with close attention to the intra-actions between natures, cultures, and the texture of language itself. Meillon is Associate Professor of English Studies at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France. A member of the Advisory Board for EASCLE (European Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment), she is the founder of the Écopoétique Perpignan Internet platform and co-founder of the OIKOS research group and network dedicated to contemporary global ecopoetics and ecocriticism, which encourages transdisciplinary approaches across the environmental arts, sciences, and humanities. The author of numerous papers on ecopoetic readings of contemporary American novelists and poets, she is a co-editor of three recent special issues of the journals Crossways Journal and Textes & Contextes on the ecopoetics of human-non-human relations and the reenchantment of urban wildness, and the editor of Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth (Lexington Books, 2020).

For additional information on Professor Meillon’s lecture, including instructions for viewing the live broadcast, see https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu.