French and Francophone Environmental Fiction

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Catastrophic floods, destructive hurricanes, record-breaking droughts: as the news and social media get saturated with apocalyptic images, the question of preserving our environment has never seemed more urgent than today. This makes sense, after all, given that we have entered what some scientists have called “the Anthropocene,” a geological epoch dominated by human-induced climate change. Yet, environmental issues have always weighed on the mind of various peoples across different times. During the Enlightenment, for instance, many philosophers criticized how industrialization further disconnected Europeans from the natural world. For enslaved people in the Caribbean, by contrast, forests became sites of cultural vitality, agency, and creativity, whether they remained on the plantations or established fugitive communities. Through a selection of films, novels, essays, poems, short stories, and graphic novels, this class will explore the place of the environment in French and Francophone fiction. Together, we will ask: what do representations of nature across multiple centuries and geographies tell us about our human condition and the societies in which we live? Taught in French.