Ecopoétique du regard et de la liminalité : entrelacs des formes du vivant dans la fiction de Linda Hogan

Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan builds on a Native American tradition of creative story-telling which interweaves history with myth, science, poetry, and imagination. Her focus on Native Americans and on the rootedness of humans in non-human-nature coalesces with a greening movement in postcolonial lit...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bénédicte Meillon
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Presses Universitaires du Midi 2016-06-01
Series:Caliban: French Journal of English Studies
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/3374
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Summary:Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan builds on a Native American tradition of creative story-telling which interweaves history with myth, science, poetry, and imagination. Her focus on Native Americans and on the rootedness of humans in non-human-nature coalesces with a greening movement in postcolonial literature and studies. Delving into Linda Hogan's ecopoet(h)ics, this paper examines her novel People of the Whale, and contributes to the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics by showing the centrality of gazes and liminality in her fiction. Not only can Victor Turner's anthropological theory of liminality shed light on the experiences of Hogan's characters, their manifold in-betweenness leads to threshold states and places revealing the multitudinous entanglements between humans and non-human life forms. In this paper, I argue that Hogan's fiction moves her readers to experience empathy and syneasthesia while immersing them in an organic realm composed of a biotic communitas. I first analyze the hybridity of her characters and the magical realist mode Hogan opts for, drawing on totemism to define notions of kinship. I then explore some of the exchanges between humans and non-humans in her fiction that may help one regain awareness of the world as an interdependent whole, the balance of which depends upon humans to either destroy or preserve.
ISSN:2425-6250
2431-1766