Conference: Ecocriticism in French Studies: Where Are We Now?

Panel discussion with Lucas Hollister, Hannah Freed-Thall, and Morgane Cadieu, moderated by Aubrey Gabel

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As ecocriticism has burgeoned in literary studies and throughout the humanities, its presence has been somewhat limited in the field of French and Francophone literature. This panel will open with a discussion of the state of the field of ecocriticism in French Studies and then move into case studies of ecocriticism coming to bear on 20^th– and 21^st-century French-Language Literature. By expanding ecocriticism beyond the Anglosphere, this panel will tackle how climate catastrophes have registered differently on the European mainland and throughout the former French empire.

Morgane Cadieu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Yale. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century prose; space and randomness in theory and literature; narratives of social emancipation and migration; materialist philosophies; and the aesthetics of trains. She is the author of Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXème siècle (Classiques Garnier, 2019.) Her research has also appeared in Fabula, Fixxion, Sites, French Forum, Formules, and the Cahiers Georges Perec. She is currently working on her second book on social mobility in contemporary literature, and writing the afterword to the special issue Beaches & Ports, co-edited with Hannah Freed-Thall, and forthcoming in Comparative Literature.

Lucas Hollister is Assistant Professor of French at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019), and his work on French literature and popular culture of the 20th and 21st centuries has appeared in French Forum, Romanic Review, The French Review, Fixxion, Genre: Forms of Culture and Discourse, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (SITES). Work from his current book project on crime fiction and ecological awareness (provisionally titled Bad Natures) appears in the October 2019 issue of PMLA. He is also guest editing a forthcoming double issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (SITES) on “Frontiers of Ecocriticism,” which is slated to appear late 2020/early 2021.

Hannah Freed-Thall is a specialist of 20th-century French literature and comparative modernisms. Her research and teaching interests include environmental humanities; aesthetic theory and the sociology of culture; queer and feminist theory; and theory of the novel. Before arriving at NYU, she was Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships in the Princeton Society of Fellows and the Brown Pembroke Center. Her first book, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (NY: Oxford, 2015) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book. Her second book, The Beach Effect, is under contract with Columbia University Press.