Mercredi 12 octobre 2022 de 17h à 19 h30 – Salle des Caryatides

Terry GIFFORD, Visiting Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University (UK) and Professor Honorifico at the Universidad de Alicante (Spain)

If the environmental crisis is a cultural crisis, how has what has been embedded in our language led to the Anthropocene? Ecocriticism attempts to deconstruct some answers. This seminar, led by a co-founder of British ecocriticism, first means to give an introduction to ecocriticism and its origins before turning to more recent developments.

This introduction to ecocriticism begins by considering what is implied by the language of a poem, ‘Bob’s Lane’, by Edward Thomas (1878-1917), a war poet known for his pastoral poetry, and one by post-war poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985). Words like ‘nature’ and ‘pastoral’, will be examined and the social construction of nature debated.

The seminar will then chart developments in pastoral theory and the evolution of ecocriticism, from phase one to phase three, in the US and the UK; its French iterations will also be included.

Terry Gifford is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and Professor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain.
He is author of 

• Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Manchester U. P. , 1995,
  2 nd ed. 2011),
• Pastoral (Routledge 1999, updated ed. 2019;
  https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315647920),
• Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (U. of Georgia Press,
  2006),
  He has written or edited seven books on Ted Hughes, most recently Ted Hughes in
  Context (2018), and published ecofeminist essays on D. H. Lawrence. D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (Routledge, 2022) is forthcoming.