Ecology and Literature

M rs. Dalloway models an ecological understanding of human life and the nonhuman world, thus o ering a corrective to harmful and outmoded scienti c perspectives. e kind of science Woolf critiques is represented not only by the cold and imperialistic attitudes of Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, but also by the attitudes of a Victorian botanist: Miss Helena Parry, Clarissa Dalloway's aunt. Troubling, damaging, inadequate approaches to understanding the natural world correspond with similar failures to understand, appreciate, or connect with the human world in a positive way. Opposing and surpassing these constrained and destructive versions of science are visionary understandings of human interconnection with the organic world, which are experienced primarily by Septimus Smith, and to a lesser degree by Clarissa Dalloway, and which point to the radical possibilities of scienti c inquiry.

Piya, the cetologist protagonist of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, includes binoculars and a GPS in the equipment that she carries with her on a research trip to the Sundarbans, or “tide country”, region of West Bengal and these can be seen as an index of the novel’s concern with cosmopolitan perspectives on the local.  The Hungry Tide provides multiple optics on the Sundarbans’ threatened eco-system of mangrove-forested islands and mudflats, representing the constant transformations it undergoes, because of daily tidal flows, with sections of land being temporarily submerged, and with seawater and freshwater intermingling.  It also demonstrates the extent to which the tide country has been a contested site, as a consequence of the differing visions of the many stakeholders in the region – state politicians, local inhabitants, conservationists and tigers among them – and at bipolar extremes has variously been seen as uninhabitable and as fertile territory for utopian projects.

Drawing on recent work on place and space in the field of cultural geography, this paper considers ways in which The Hungry Tide debates ecological issues and projects a human geography that attempts to mediate between cosmopolitan and subaltern voices.  The paper suggests that Piya’s situation, as an American of Bengali descent who is returning to her ancestral homeland on a professional mission, refracts back on the novel’s own positioning in relation to its localized South Asian setting. 

The online text of this article can be accessed through the Muse India site (www.museindia.com) and typing my surname in the Author’s Index section. It is not readily accessible by going straight to issue 24 of the journal.

La natura nei versi tra desiderio utopico e percezione distopica Due tradizioni a confronto: Gary Snyder e Pier Luigi Bacchini La parola ecologia ha almeno due accezioni principali: la prima, di ambito scientifico, è lo studio di un ecosistema cioè l'insieme dei rapporti reciproci fra gli organismi viventi e l'ambiente circostante; la seconda, propria dell'uso comune, è la salvaguardia dell'ambiente naturale. La prima accezione tende a considerare l'uomo come parte della natura, dotato perciò di un suo ecosistema, e magari agente di rapida e profonda trasformazione su altri ecosistemi o sull'ecosistema-pianeta; la seconda accezione può tendere, invece, a collocare l'uomo al di fuori della natura come agente pericolosamente perturbante o, al limite opposto e corrispondente, come potenziale salvatore.

Ekolojik felaketler ve zararlarıyla mücadele etmenin birden fazla yolu vardır. Bu mücadelenin bir boyutu egemen yapının değiştirilmesi ise öteki ekolojik bilgelik ve doğayla empati yapmaktır. Doğaya tahakküm kuran değil, doğanın bir parçası olduğunu düşünen bireyler için edebiyat yeni umut kapıları açar.

Ekokurgu, edebiyatta doğa ve çevrenin nasıl algılandığını, onlara karşı işlenmiş suçların neler olduğunu, nasıl işlendiğini ve bunlar için ne gibi çözüm yolları geliştirildiğini araştırmıştır. 21. yüzyılda yazılan ABD kökenli ekokurgu eserler incelenip, günümüz ve sonrasına ışık tutacak çözümlemeler yapılmıştır. Edebiyat varsa hala umut vardır.

Sezgin Toska, insanları edebiyat ve edebiyat çalışmaları aracılığıyla ekoloji ve sürdürülebilir yaşam üzerine bir kez daha düşünmeye ve harekete geçmek için edebiyattan ilham almaya davet ediyor. Ekokurgunun geniş yelpazesi edebiyatı ekolojik sorunların çözüm yolu haline getiriyor.

Elinizdeki kitap göz göre göre yitip gidenleri çaresizce izlerken etrafımızı çevreleyen, üstümüzü örten, içimize işleyen gücün, egemenliğin sembolü kara bulutların aslında birer beton, bükülmez demir, çözünmez kimyasal gibi inşa edilmesine karşın romantizm, sevgi, emek ve umut ile çözüleceğinin resmidir.

[IT]
Nell’opera di Luigi Meneghello, la rappresentazione del mondo vegetale rimanda a un sottotesto di immagini e simboli: una rete di isotopie botaniche che, nel farsi sistema, autorizza una lettura alternativa e inedita. Dalle pagine di Libera nos a malo (1963), fino alle ‘carte postume’ de L’apprendistato (2012), «l’inframondo verdastro» diviene il punto di partenza per ricostruire una biosfera letteraria, attraversata sempre da un duplice movimento: memoria intertestuale e interazione continua fra lingua italiana, lingua inglese e dialetto vicentino. Il ‘giardino riflesso’ di Meneghello si rivela così in tutta la sua valenza semantica e fa luce su un tema che risulta essere di grande complessità e un oggetto di particolare interesse per l’ecocritica letteraria.

[EN]
In Luigi Meneghello’s works, representation of the vegetable kingdom refers to a subtext of images and symbols, which leads up to an alternative way of reading. In an ecocritical perspective, plants become the starting point of a literary biosphere, animated by two movements: intertextuality and interaction between English, Italian language and dialect.

The first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales are  often referred to as the ‘reverdie passage’. The word reverdie means regreening. It is interesting to note that Chaucer does not merely celebrate the onset of spring in his reverdie passage. He goes a step further and suggests a new paradigm in which there is a meaningful kinship between humans and their physical environment. These lines posit a unique world view in which the divine, the natural and the human are envisioned as one seamless unity. Chaucer argues that the onset of spring effectively creates in human beings a desire for a communion with nature, which promotes a meaningful bond between humans and nature, that is spiritual in content. My paper Ecocritical Reading of the Reverdie Passage In Chaucer’s General Prologue To The Canterbury Tales will first discuss the concepts of Hierarchic, Anarchic, and Integrated Oikos of Dr. Nirmal Selvamony and then apply the concept of Integrated Oikos to the reverdie passage in order to show that Chaucer’s vision, as evidenced in the passage, is a deep ecological vision, which will stand humans in good stead in this world of crass materialism.

In the past years, the agentic and semiotic properties of material reality have been the focus of many areas of research, producing an exuberant “turn to the material” also in the debate about the humanities. This “material turn” is indeed a broad conversation across disciplines, combining physics and sociology, biology and anthropology, ontology and epistemology, feminist theories, archaeology, and geography, just to name a few. The paradigm emerging from this debate prompts not only fresh nonanthropocentric vistas, but also possible “ways of understanding the agency, significance, and ongoing transformative power of the world – ways that account for myriad [...] phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal and technological” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 5). The underlying task of this discourse is that of providing an onto-epistemological framework for non-dichotomous modes to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, matter and mind, nature and culture.
A crossroad of scientific and humanistic research by definition, the environ- mental humanities is the field in which this “turn” received foremost attention. Ecocritical theory responds to this conceptual conversation by heeding material dynamics via an enlargement of its hermeneutical field of application. A material ecocriticism, in other words, investigates matter both in texts and as a text, elaborating a reflection on the way “bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). Drawing from the philosophical and scientific insights of the new materialisms, this essay explores the main points of material ecocriticism, focusing in particular on the notion of “narrative agency” and on the way interpreting “stories of matter” becomes possible as an ecocritical practice.

This article aims to demonstrate how the notions of identity representation and ecological narrative complement each other in defining both the characters and stories that Caribbean writer Derek Walcott sketches in his well-known epic Omeros. In tune with the theories that have shaped “literary ecology”, this study displays the symbolic role the natural and animistic world plays in the poem. Walcottian protagonists are lost in an “edge of the world” they perceive as hostile. By presenting the hybrid cultural background that characterises the West Indian space, this article addresses two emblematic episodes of Walcottian Omeros and focuses on the uncovering of truths the Caribbean land has concealed from human understanding. It is only through reconciliation with nature that once-colonised peoples are capable of accepting their colonial legacy and finally setting down roots in a place they can call home.

The spectre of global warming has shaken mankind like never before. Uncontrolled urbanization and industrialization coupled with emissions from vehicles, air-conditioners, etc. on the one hand and senseless deforestation and exploitation of natural resources on the other have brought us face-to-face with a daunting scenario. It is but appropriate that the literary world should take up cudgels and make reading public including the young generation aware of the urgency to take corrective measures. Leading Indian writers have produced literary works that underline their concern in this regard. My paper explores the domain of Indian English Fiction and critically studies works by eminent authors like Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy and some not-so-eminent ones and concludes common concern even as these deal with life in different areas affected by different types of problems in different milieu.

The spectre of global warming has shaken mankind like never before. Uncontrolled urbanization and industrialization coupled with emissions from vehicles, air-conditioners, etc. on the one hand and senseless deforestation and exploitation of natural resources on the other have brought us face-to-face with a daunting scenario. It is but appropriate that the literary world should take up cudgels and make reading public including the young generation aware of the urgency to take corrective measures. Leading Indian writers have produced literary works that underline their concern in this regard. My paper explores the domain of Indian English Fiction and critically studies works by eminent authors like Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy and some not-so-eminent ones and concludes common concern even as these deal with life in different areas affected by different types of problems in different milieu.

У раду представљамо могуће теоријске домете екокритике, као једне од новијих перспектива у проучавању књижевности. Посебна пажња се посвећује историјском утемељењу ове теоријске позиције, као и њеним импликацијама на поимање целине неке националне књижевности. Та-кође, критичком перспективизацијом екокритике и њеним историјским ситуирањем, указује се како на сложен однос природе и културе, тако и на неке савремене проблеме у проучавању књижевности, који се пре свега односе на измењено поимање опсега књижевноисторијске грађе.

Representing various theoretical positions of ecocriticism as one of the newest paradigms in literary criticism, the paper showed a potential interconnection between ecocriticism and history of literature. Many important concepts of ecocriticism such as distinction between nature and culture, environmental activism, and interdisciplinary methodology,
can change the way we see literature as an art. Therefore, ecological discourse can have many other interpretative consequences on historical view of literature and concept of national literature as well.

Ghaʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān's novel al-Murtajā wa-l-muʾajjal (The Yearned for and the Postponed, 1986) depicts the lives of Iraqi exiles in Russia. By using a new ecocritical analytical approach-a combination of Georg Lukács's theory (1974) regarding the connection between longing and form, Mas‛ud Hamdan's description of art as a means of expressing the complexities of human life (2009), and Theodor Adorno's view of exile as a mutilating experience (2000)-this article aims to explore how Farmān uses ecological landscapes to reflect the exilic experience. The analysis, coupling environmental studies with migration studies and contributing to both, shows that not only is this novel as relevant to the depiction of current-day exile as it was at the time when it was published, but that through it, Farmān informs the existing knowledge of historical events by artistically documenting horrific chapters in Iraqi political history from the victims' point of view, in a way that transcends the scope of the abovementioned theories.
https://www.ariel.ac.il/wp/jimes/wp-content/uploads/sites/147/2021/12/Hilla-Peled-Shapira.pdf

Published in Asian Highlands Perspectives, Centering the Local: A Festschrift for Dr. Charles Kevin Stuart on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. 2015 (37):99-121.

While researching how animals, plants, and the natural
environment are depicted in Yi traditional folk literature, I discovered that cervids, deer and their relatives, specifically species of musk deer, are widely and prominently represented. These deer seem to figure in the folk literature and lore of Yi everywhere – from the Liangshan Mountains of southern Sichuan, all across Yunnan, to western Guizhou Province. In this paper I will look at images of musk deer in several local traditions of Yi oral and oral-connected literature, rituals, and customs that in various ways help construct relationships between the realms of wild, domestic, and supernatural in the poetic worlds of the texts. Thus, the paper will not only explore how the Yi imagine the musk deer in both poetic and natural worlds, but also suggest how an ecological perspective that engenders local responses to the natural environment as expressed in folklore can contribute to the concept of Yi rentong.

Parlare "senza mezzi termini". Esprimersi con parole piene, decise e non equivoche. Oppure, ribaltare l'espressione per affermare con forza la volontà di fare il contrario: parlare con-fondendo, prediligere le forme ibride, praticare sconfinamenti. A partire dal XX secolo, il panorama delle arti ha vissuto una nuova fase di emancipazione dalle soluzioni tradizionali aprendosi a inedite possibilità espressive, sempre più eterogenee e contaminate. Nasce da questo assunto l'intento di riunire un insieme di voci che ha scelto di indagare l'orizzonte della contaminazione artistica spaziando tra letteratura, fumetto, fotografia, cinema e performance: i contributi qui inclusi, che procedono da un'impronta letteraria a un carattere via via più visivo-performativo, restituiscono gli interventi discussi nell'ambito del convegno che al volume presta il titolo, svoltosi a Pavia il 12 aprile 2018 presso il Collegio Nuovo-Fondazione Sandra ed Enea Mattei.

This essay will address some of the intersections between surrealism and the ecological view, looking at the latent Darwinian position of the surrealists' uncanny dissolution of the boundaries between the human and non-human natural realms; how the surrealists' critique of instrumental reason and insistence upon the significance of poetic, inter-connective, thinking finds accord with ecologists' research into the continuities between humans and nature at large; and how the general politicizing thrust of surrealism, particularly its critique of 'restricted', liberal economics, presented a resistance to the naturalizing of self-interest and the Hobbesian view of nature that continues to legitimize the anti-ecological global hegemony of the corporate-industrial bloc.

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

Looking at Simon McBurney's award-winning solo performance The Encounter (2015), this paper examines the play's contribution to environmental humanities through an ecocritical study of its combined use of state-of-the-art sound design and the age-old art of storytelling to address the link between the ecological and spiritual crises that we are facing. The Encounter relates the real story of the American photographer Loren McIntyre who lived with the Mayoruna tribe for six weeks in 1969 after getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Relying heavily on sound design to take us deep into the jungle, the show addresses our relation to nature and technology and elicits our empathy to denounce the dictates of a globalised world ruled and threatened by neoliberal and neocolonial capitalistic ideologies. As the brainand the stagebecome the forest, The Encounter challenges the notions of distance and separation from the Other in favour of a deep sense of interconnectedness. Using Donna J. Haraway's 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this paper sheds light on how The Encounter invites us to recognise the urgency of defining what it means to live together in "response-ability on a damaged earth" (Haraway 2) and how the intermedial, hybrid qualities of the play found not a "post-human" but, on the contrary, a "com-post" theatre piece (11).

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Avec The Encounter, Simon McBurney et son Théâtre de Complicité mettent en scène l’histoire vraie de la rencontre entre un photographe américain et une tribu indigène en plein cœur de la forêt amazonienne à la fin des années 1960. Acclamée par la critique et récompensée à de multiples reprises depuis sa création au festival d’Édimbourg en 2015, cette performance solo de McBurney explore le lien entre les crises environnementales et spirituelles que nous traversons et vise à provoquer une réaction empathique chez les membres du public pour créer un éveil des consciences et nous inviter à nous mobiliser face à l’écocide et au génocide qui ravagent l’Amazonie (et le Brésil en particulier) et mettent en danger la planète entière. À travers les expériences de désorientation, de confusion, d'épuisement, d’hallucination sous psychotropes et de communication télépathique du protagoniste, la pièce interroge nos représentations conventionnelles du temps et de l'espace ainsi que notre relation à la nature et à la technologie, tout en faisant appel à notre empathie pour résister aux injonctions d'un monde globalisé sous la tutelle et sous la menace d'idéologies capitalistes néolibérales et néo coloniales. The Encounter nous invite à un voyage chamanique qui abolit les notions de distance et de séparation de l'autre au nom d'un profond sentiment d’interconnexion, qui se donne à la fois comme principe écologique fondamental de la vie sur terre et comme un principe théâtral et poétique qui informe la pièce en entrelaçant une multiplicité d'histoires, de voix et de médiums pour faire récit. Dans le cadre des humanités environnementales et le champ de l'écothéâtre, cet article propose une étude écocritique de la manière dont la pièce à la fois mobilise l'art immémorial du storytelling et convoque un design sonore high-tech semi-immersif, à partir de la proposition de Donna Haraway de « rester dans le trouble ». Son ouvrage de 2016, Staying with the Trouble, nous permet en effet de montrer comment The Encounter nous invite à être des « mortal earthlings in thick copresence » et à reconnaître l'urgence qu'il y a à définir ce que cela signifie de vivre ensemble en « response-ability on a damaged earth », éclairant ainsi la manière dont la pièce participe de l'élaboration de nouvelles façons de se relier les uns aux autres et de « making kin in the Chthulucene », pour citer le sous-titre de son livre. Le terme choisi par Haraway pour qualifier cette nouvelle ère est fondée sur l'idée que en tant qu’« êtres chtoniques » (« Chtonic ones »), c'est à dire des « beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the minute », nous avons besoin de créer des formes hybrides sans précédent de collaboration entre espèces, multimodales et transgénérationnelles, pour survivre aux forces d'extermination de l'anthropocène et du capitalocène. Cet article soutient que la pièce de McBurney contribue ainsi à fonder un théâtre pour le Chthulucène, avec et pour les êtres chtoniques.

The article examines the representation of the African woman in a twenty-first century Nigerian novel, Vincent Egbuson’s Womandela. Critical attention is shifted from the popular feminist reading of African literature which privileges areas of immediate discomfort for the African woman, that is, domestic/marital, cultural and economic issues. My critical lens focuses on the issue of political empowerement of the African woman. The article acknowledges the fact that African women in pre-colonial era enjoyed great political power in varying degrees in different communities, it then proceeds to analyse how Egbuson subverts the contemporary political emasculation of the African woman by drawing on the legend of the late South African President, Nelson Mandela to produce an African female political amazon. The analysis reveals the use of Othering, syntactic deconstruction of some nominals and pronominals, myth reversal and onomastic neologism as strategies of relocating African women from the margin to the centre, specifically to the political centre.

Postcolonial Literary Geographies examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It considers the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography. Individual chapters deal with cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, and the book also considers the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Preview extracts are available on Amazon -- see below.

Utopian literature provides a compelling vision of epistemological and moral clarity: a dream of harmony and justice. But in an age of surveillance, utopia is also the nightmare of a perfectly controlled, sealed and monitored world that leaves no room for ambivalence or discretion. In The Good Place, leading scholars of comparative literature explore this tension and examine the richness and diversity of utopian writing, from the genre's earliest manifestations to the present. Utopia is seen as a tenacious force of the human imagination: a desire for renewal that manifests itself in the tension between social reality and the virtual worlds of unlived possibility. Notable for its engagement with a wide range of texts from different periods and national traditions, this book invites the reader to rethink 'the good place' from the specific perspective of literary studies and suggests that utopia, in the realm of fiction, is more than just a philosophical abstraction. Mediated by the experience of authors, characters and readers, utopian literature offers a transient but genuine experience of perfection, beyond the horizon of everyday lived experience.

Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death. In the face of this realisation, the human subject enters a melancholic state, which, in turn, permits deeper insight into the fate of the more-than-human world. The rhetoric of loss, identified by Juliana Schiesari as a key to melancholy, can be traced throughout contemporary poetry, which offers a means to contemplate the temporal rupture of environmental destruction at the same time as it acknowledges the challenges to representation it brings. This essay will explore these dynamics in a range of poems by contemporary Irish and British women, revealing an encounter between the embodied self and nature that has profound effects on the construction of the poetic subject, and on traditional approaches to form.

Attraverso la testimonianza di Primo Levi e di Italo Calvino si ricostruisce il modo in cui in Italia ci si è rapportati al problema dell'amianto: alla dismissione delle cave e dei siti adibiti al suo trattamento e all'invasiva presenza della micidiale sostanza su tutto il territorio italiano,

D egrado ambientale, emergenze climatiche, abusivismo edilizio; e d'altra parte battaglie per le energie rinnovabili, per l'agricoltura biologica, per la tutela del paesaggio: la questione ecologica invade lanostraquotidianità nelle forme piùdisparate. E alimentaoperedisparate altrettanto: dagli ecothriller in cui eroi solitari fronteggiano catastrofi innescate da poteri occulti, a romanzi come Underworld di De Lillo o La strada di McCarthy.

This article discusses an early Steinbeck novel written during his time living in Monterey—To a God Unknown (1933)—as a hermeneutic for assessing his metaphysics, developed out of his observations of natural cycles with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and a young Joseph Campbell. Described as “speculative metaphysics” by Steinbeck in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), their philosophical approach to the world emphasizes holism: spiritually, ecologically, and psychologically. Steinbeck articulates this conception of reality in To a God Unknown. This article shows how these beliefs and the vocabulary Steinbeck uses to describe them are heavily influenced by the company he kept—Ricketts and Campbell. It then close reads Steinbeck’s novel, illuminating the author’s use of a cyclical organizing schema in the form of a recurring trope: a pine glade embedded with spirit, that provides an ebbing and flowing pattern to the characters’ psychological behavior and physical actions. The cyclical return of this important trope has thus far escaped critical attention but is an important demonstration of Steinbeck’s speculative metaphysics. This organizational schema is consistent throughout and provides a subtle, yet persuasive alternative reading of the book, in contrast to the erratic demarcated chapter breaks. In addition to elements of biographical and historical context, the critical lens in this article calls on Jungian psychoanalysis, Campbell’s myth theories, Deep Ecology, and Anthropocene approaches, as each is appropriate to explicate the unique approach to holism in physical, metaphysical, and psychological nature within Steinbeck’s work.

Written during his time living in Monterey, Steinbeck's early novel To a God Unknown (1933) may be used as a hermeneutic for assessing his metaphysics, which he developed from observations of natural cycles with marine biologist Ed Ricketts and a young Joseph Campbell. Their philosophical approach to the world—which Steinbeck describes as “speculative metaphysics” in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)—emphasizes a holism that includes spirituality, ecology, and psychology. Steinbeck articulates this conception of reality in To a God Unknown. These beliefs and the vocabulary Steinbeck uses to describe them are heavily influenced by the company he kept—Ricketts and Campbell. A close reading of this novel illuminates his use of a cyclical organizing schema in the form of a recurring trope: a pine glade embedded with spirit that lends an ebb-and-flow pattern to the characters' psychological behavior and physical actions. The cyclical return of this important trope has thus fa...

This chapter gives an account of surrealism and pataphysics in the context of René Daumal's novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Partly written in the mountains of southern France when the author was in the final stages of chronic tuberculosis, the novel was left incomplete at the time of Daumal's death in May 1944 and published posthumously in 1952.

Eric Chevillard est connu pour son travail formel sur les conventions littéraires et sur le langage. Or, dans ses travaux les plus récents, il met son art – apparemment incompatible avec des interventions politiques – au service de la dénonce de questions écologiques.
En effet, dans son blog, L’Autofictif, il critique souvent l’usage désolant que l’humanité fait de la planète. Aussi, dans son roman Oreille rouge (2005), il dénonce les problèmes écologiques en Afrique, notamment celui des savanes désertifiées. Quant à Sans l’orang-outan (2007), son dernier roman, il est une véritable fiction écologiste: l’’auteur y imagine les conséquences catastrophiques qu’aurait l’extinction de l’orang-outan sur l’écosystème planétaire et sur notre société.
Dans ces travaux de l’auteur nous retrouvons les traits caractéristiques de son écriture. Ceux-ci y ont cependant la fonction de rendre le lecteur plus conscient de la crise environnementale.

The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China.
A key ritual text of the Nuosu sub-group of the Yi ethnic groups of southwest China.  Creation of sky, Earth, landscape, flora, fauna, early humans, present-day humans; migrations; genealogy; substantial introduction, photos, Northern Yi romanization, etc.