Weaving Words into Worlds

Caroline Durand-Rous · Margot Lauwers

Oct 2023 · Vernon Press

About this ebook

'Weaving Words into Worlds' comes as the third spinoff of the international ecopoetics conference organized in Perpignan in 2016. Reflecting upon how the many stories we tell directly influence the world we live in, each of the contributions in this international volume directs our attention to the constant, ecopoetic weaving of word to the world at work via the many entanglements between mind, matter, and meaning, whether on a local or a global scale. It encapsulates how the words, stories, and concepts we humans articulate as we try to make sense of the world we inhabit give part of its shape to the web of ecological relations that we depend on for survival. It seeks to cast light on the disenchanting and reenchanting powers of stories and poiesis in general—as stories retain the power to make us either become oblivious to and destroy or to feel and honor the many, complex ties between the multitudinous nature cultures intertwined within the fabric of a multispecies world always in the making.

This book offers a total of fourteen articles written by international scholars in ecocriticism and ecopoetics who, by their analyses of literature and/or films and the political subtext they thus render visible, aim at showing how the study of environmentally minded media may renew our attention to the entangled agencies of the human and the more-than-human realm. Thus, this work offers to counter a reproach ecocriticism has often been met with, namely the over-presence of US scholars and the lack of diversity in subjects in the field, since the articles presented provide a wide variety of approaches and topics with examples of UK and Native American literature, Polynesian myth, graphic novels, or haiku. In doing so, the book expands on the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics, adding to this branch of study and enriching it with high-quality academic studies.

About the author

Caroline Durand-Rous holds a Ph.D. in American literature and Native Studies entitled 'Reinvented Totems: Exploring Identities and Rewriting Oneself in Contemporary Native American Fiction'. Her research focuses on Native American novels and how ambivalent totemic figures offer guidance to characters in disarray on the path to the discovery of hybrid identities. She has published articles in L'Atelier and Transatlantica and has participated in European conferences held by the AFEA, the AIW, and the EASLCE, where she presented her analyses of Louise Erdrich's 'The Painted Drum', David Treuer's 'The Translation of Dr. Apelles' and Eden Robinson's 'Monkey Beach'.

Margot Lauwers holds a Ph.D. in American literature and ecofeminism from the University of Perpignan. There, she taught business English, English language, technical and literary translation, and American civilization for eight years. She has also worked as an English teacher in middle and high school. She has been an Assistant Editor for 'Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment' since 2016. She has completed the translation to French of Carolyn Merchant's 'The Death of Nature' (Wildprojects, Marseille, Autumn 2021) and of Susan Griffin's 'Woman and Nature the Roaring Inside Her' (Editions Le Pommier, Paris, Summer 2021).