Dwellings of Enchantment Writing and Reenchanting the Earth

About this book

Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us – entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment of humans' relationships with and perceptions of the world entailed by a modern ontology, this book illustrates the power of ecopoetics to attune humans to the vibrant matter both within and outside of us. Braiding indigenous with non-indigenous worldviews, this book tackles ecopoetics emerging from varying locations in the world. It underscores the postmodernist, remythologizing processes going on in many ecopoetic texts, via magical realist modes and mythopoeia.

Contents

Foreword: Ecopoetics at the Tipping Point by Joni Adamson
Introduction: What Matters Sings: Ecopoetics of Reenchantment by Bénédicte Meillon

Part I: Theorizing Ecopoetics of (Re)Enchantment
Chapter 1: Necessary Wonder: Promises and Pitfalls of Enchantment by Charles Holdefer
Chapter 2: ‘I Turn Homeward, Wondering’: Reasons for Enchantment by Yves-Charles Grandjeat
Chapter 3: Everyone is Absorbed: Enchanting Substance in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach by Randall Roorda
Chapter 4: Nature’s Speech and Storytelling: The Voice of Wisdom in the Nonhuman by Françoise Besson
Chapter 5: ‘A Place Grown Intense And Holy’: Dwelling in the Enchanted World of Words by Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves

Part II: Dwellings of Enchantment in Literatures of Place, Old, and New
Chapter 6: Wonder, Enchantment, and the New Nature Writing by Joshua Mabie
Chapter 7: Eco-memoir, Belonging, and the Ecopoetics of Settler Colonial Enchantment by Tom Lynch
Chapter 8: Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era in the New American Literature of Place by Wendy Harding

Part III: Of Animal Elusiveness, Death, and Wonder: Zoopoetics and the Quest for Common Ground
Chapter 9: Zoopoethics: Literature Challenged by Industrial Livestock Farming by Anne Simon
Chapter 10: Ron Rash’s Above the Waterfall, or the Square Root of Wonderful by Frédérique Spill
Chapter 11: A Poetics of Traces in Rick Bass’s Short Stories by Claire Cazajous-Augé

Part IV: Of Postcolonial and Ecofeminist Spellings and Spells: When Magical Realism Challenges Modern Ontology and Epistemology
Chapter 12: Conversations with the Living World: Mutual Discovery and Enchantment by Carmen Flys Junquera
Chapter 13: Writing a Way Home: Liminality, Magical Realism, and the Building of a Biotic Communitas in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and People of the Whale by Bénédicte Meillon
Chapter 14: The Magic Realist Compost in the Anthropocene: Improbable Assemblages in Canadian and Australian Fiction by Jessica Maufort
Chapter 15: Learning to Live in the Anthropocene: Orality as Recycling in Contemporary Latin American Indigenous Poetry by Antonio Cuadrado-Fernandez
Chapter 16: Shadows of Enchantment in Indian Forest Fiction: Mahasweta Devi’s “The Hunt” and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey by Alan Johnson
Chapter 17: Anna Livia’s Anthropocene Ecopoetics by Rachel Nisbet
Chapter 18: Theodore Roszak's Glade in The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: An Ecofeminist Dwelling of Emancipation by Noémie Moutel

Part V: Writers’ Corner: An Essay by Chickasaw Writer and Poet Linda Hogan
Chapter 19: Ways of the Cranes by Linda Hogan

About the Contributors

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Biography

Bénédicte Meillon is associate professor of English studies at the Université of Perpignan Via Domitia.