Conférence : “Ecopoétique du réenchantement: réalisme liminal et échos poétiques de la terre” par Bénédicte Meillon, University of Florida, Gainesville

Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various, indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies within a Western context, my readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of “liminal realism” – a mode that shares much with magical realism, but that is approached here through an ecopoetic lens for the way that it specifically works an interspecies kind of magic, situating us in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book examines the interweaving of separate onto-epistemologies in prose writing that reenchants our rapport with the world both by promoting a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis, and by restoring our capacity for wonder as well as our sensitive intelligence. In addition, liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews. The monograph furthermore homes in on the rematerializing of language and the sensuous poiesis at play in my corpus, which work together to produce poetic echoes of the biophony and geophony that compose the world’s polyphonic soundscapes. The book also pays a great deal of attention to the odorscapes that are enmeshed in the textures of the world and relayed by the ecopoetic texts. Throughout, my take on ecopoetic writing reveals the initiatory function of an ecopoiesis that works like postmodern shamanism, mediating between human and other-than-human worlds.