Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth

by Bénédicte Meillon

Overview

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism—a mode that shares much with magical realism but that is approached through an ecopoetic lens, specifically working an interspecies kind of magic, situating readers in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book promotes a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis. It restores our capacity for wonder together with our sensitive intelligence. Liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews as it calls attention to the soundscapes, odorscapes, feelscapes, and landscapes of the world. This monograph offers an original transdisciplinary and cross-Atlantic take on ecopoetics as it straddles the two academic worlds and sparks a conversation between artworks, theories, and studies emerging from the English-speaking world as well as from Francophone contexts.

Entangling the materiality of language back within the flesh of the world, this book and the texts under study provide insight into the fundamentally sympoietic dimension of ecopoiesis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666910445
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/15/2024
Series:	Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Pages:	386
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Bénédicte Meillon is associate professor at the University of Perpignan and affiliated with the LARCA- CNRS at the Université de Paris.

Table of Contents

Part One: From Disenchantment to an Ecopoetics of Reenchantment

Chapter One: Disenchanted, Enchanted, and Reenchanted Worldviews

Chapter Two: Toward an Ecofeminist, Ecopoetic Project of a Rational Reenchantment

Chapter Three: An Ecofeminist Remystification of Narrative: The Many Faces of Gaia in the Anthrop-o(bs)cene

Chapter Four: Sowing the Seeds of an Ecopoet(h)ics of Wonder and Enchantment: Reincorporating Language and the Human into the Flesh and Song of the World

Part Two: Ecopoetic Reenchantment via Liminal Realism

Chapter Five: Why Liminal, Rather than “Magical,” “Spiritual,” “Mystical,” “Ontological,” or “Epistemological” Realism?

Chapter Six: Postcolonial Liminality and (Re)initiation into a Multispecies World: Moving betwixt and between Human and Other-than-Human Realms in Linda Hogan’s Power and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Chapter Seven: Post-Pastoral, Non-Indigenous Thought-Experiments with Totemic and Animistic Liminality

Chapter Eight: Liminal Realism and Interspecies Thought-Experiments in Contemporary Fiction

Part Three: Writing and Dwelling Ecopoetically

Chapter Nine: Ecopoets and the Art of Anamorphosis

Chapter Ten: Postmodern Shamanism: Making Headway Toward Other-than-Human Perspectives

Chapter Eleven: Reweaving Word to World: Ecopoets as Instruments of the Sympoietic Song of the Earth

Chapter Twelve: Restor(y)ing and Rewor(l)ding: Writing in a Grounded Middle Voice

Chapter Thirteen: Translating the Song of the Earth: Reen-chanting Earthly Harmonies

Editorial Reviews

Bénédicte Meillon’s Ecopoetics of Reenchantment is a groundbreaking literary study that reinvents magical realism into the new concept of liminal realism, which perfectly matches the author’s urge to reconsider the epistemological duality that has long regarded nature and the sensible world as subservient to reason and to envision a new terrestrial spirituality combining poetry with a scientific approach to the natural world. If many of the writers and texts Meillon studies through her miraculous close readings are American ecofeminists, her arguments daringly make Rachel Carson resonate with Richard Powers, Ann Pancake with Ron Rash, and Leslie Marmon Silko with, most surprisingly and most convincingly, French novelist Jean Giono. It’s both a challenging and a very pleasant book; it confirms Meillon’s primordial place in ecocriticism.”

Frédérique Spill

"A work of remarkable critical breadth and nuance. Drawing on an inspiring range of literary, scientific, and philosophical sources, Meillon proposes an audacious remedy to the withering stillness of an age of disenchantment and ecocide. We must touch, smell, taste, and above all listen to the sensuous matter of ecopoetic speech, and draw up from dark, silent wells of repression exuberant songs of the Earth, the wild rhythms and melodies of a more-than-human world that is our most vital dwelling place."

Terry Harpold

In this wonder-full work Bénédicte Meillon assembles and analyzes a unique corpus of fiction, which is entangled with scientific understandings, in which diverse literary creatives are expressing kinship with and belonging to the entire community of life. Meillon demonstrates that these spiritualities have significant, global, cultural traction. Diverse environmental studies scholars will find Ecopoetics of Reenchantment to be fascinating, valuable, and even inspiring.”

Bron Taylor

"Bẻnẻdicte Meillon in Ecopoetics of Reenchantment provides a haunting and melodic reinvigoration of the notion of enchantment, with an emphasis on song, that will echo in readers’ minds far beyond the confines of its pages. Her ecofeminist phenomenological readings of literary works display a dazzling synergy of new and established disciplinary fields that demonstrates how much ecopoetics has benefitted from new materialism and other ways of conceiving human entanglement with the world of which we remain inseparably a part."

Patrick Murphy