La question du roman terraqué aujourd’hui

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to show how the terraqueous novel can open paths to an ecocriticism often tainted with a reputation of auxiliary to localist, picturesque or “wilderness” literature. The interlacing of land and sea generates texts which, by confronting two imaginaries, two morals, ancestral land customs and the unpredictable sea, launch semantic and ethical challenges to ecocriticism, gives it a new legitimacy far from any localist recovery. Three Breton novels will serve as a laboratory for an ecology of the mind, whose epistemological implications go beyond the literary, committing us to see the poetic re-inscription in the place as a more responsible, "operational" (Barthes) way of apprehending the world which surrounds us, a world "finished and nevertheless abundant" (Caillois), in the process of "deglobalization" (Latour).

Keywords

• Barthes (Roland)
• ecocriticism
• Caillois (Roger)
• Latour (Bruno)
• terraqueous novel