The Ecopoetics of War by Belluc, Sylvain; Brasme, Isabelle; Tanguy, Guillaume;

Short description:

The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and non-human entities in the context of conflict as it is recorded in literature and culture.

Long description:

The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and nonhuman entities in the context of conflict, as recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essays demonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ways in which the borders between human and nonhuman—including flora,fauna, and technology—become porous, thus questioning traditional onto-epistemological and ethical categories.

Bringing together British, American, and postcolonial studies, The Ecopoetics of War covers a variety of historical periods, geographical areas, and literary genres. Interdisciplinary in its outlook, it intertwines war studies, ecocriticism, literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. By analyzing the stylistic and discursive strategies devised by writers to translate the sensory experience of the battlefield, the contributors shed light on the unique capacity of literature to foreground the entanglement of human and nonhuman in the context of armed conflict, and thus unveil an “ecopoetics of war.”

This collection will interest scholars of literature, specialists of war studies and ecocriticism, and any reader interested in such issues such as ecowar, ecocide, the Anthropocene, or environmental justice. It can inspire interdisciplinary teaching or research projects, especially in the current context of global environmental crisis.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Sylvain Belluc, Isabelle Brasme, and Guillaume Tanguy

PART I

Distributive Agency, Shared Vulnerability, and Decomposition

1 Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War Stories and Essays: The Bitterness of a “Cynic” or the Insight of a Neo-Materialist?

Marie-Odile Salati

2 Between Safety and Conflict: War and Nature in a Few Poems of the First World War

Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt

3 Fantasized Muddy Landscapes: William Faulkner’s World War I

Frédérique Spill

PART II

Resilience, Recomposition, and Reconsideration

4 Plotting the Blitzscape: from Representation to Composition in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950)

Clémence Laburthe-Tolra

5 Knocking on Delville Wood: The Destruction of Natural Elements During World War I and The Construction of a South African Memory

Gilles Teulié

6 “A Prophetic Vision of the Past:” The Nature of War in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des Derniers Gestes (2002)

Carine Mardorossian

7 The Dissenting Ecology of War Writing: Capitalocene and Ecocide in the Iraq War Fiction of Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, and Roy Scranton

Julien Brugeron

PART III

Technopoetics

8 The Corpse in the Garden: War and Nature in American Literature, from Walt Whitman to James Ellroy     

Benoît Tadié

9 Knights on Wheels: Chivalry and Horsepower in the American Ambulance Corps

Daniel Bowman

10 Submarine Optics in Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop

Rachel Murray