Contenu du sommaire : Écrire la nature

Point de vue sur ..« l'État des contre-pouvoirs »

• Institutional Competition and Conflict in a Separated System : the Congress, the Presidency and the Courts at the Turn of the Century - John E. Owens p. 99-127
  Cet article montre comment des partis polarisés ont reconquis leur place au Capitole tout en devenant de fortes sources de tension dans les relations Présidence-Congrès. Depuis le 11 septembre 2001, de nouvelles tensions institutionnelles se sont ajoutées à ces divisions partisanes. George W. Bush s'est auto-proclamé président de guerre et a affirmé ses privilèges exécutifs unilatéralement, avec agressivité. Ce n'est que dans certaines limites – et un peu tard – que le Congrès et les Cours de justice ont repris leur rôle dans l'équilibrage des pouvoirs pour faire contrepoids au Président. Ces tensions dans les relations institutionnelles sous l'égide d'une « guerre » contre la terreur pourraient représenter un déplacement significatif, sinon permanent, de l'équilibre des pouvoirs au sein des instances gouvernantes des États-Unis.
• Regarder à perte de vue et écrire quand même : quelques propositions sur la littérature écologique américaine - Yves-Charles Grandjeat p. 19-32
  This paper draws from the works of Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Rick Bass and Barry Lopez to outline what an ecological text is. It suggests that what matters is not so much what the text conveys in terms of message, but the way it conveys it—its self-conscious choices of narrative and rhetorical strategies appropriate to a non anthropocentric textual handling of the natural world. It pays close attention to the way in which ecological texts question their own politics of representation through a consistent staging of a crisis in seeing, suggesting how inadequate the human gaze is when seeking to picture nature. It also investigates how ecological texts draw attention to their own language, particularly through their systematic use of incongruous comparisons, not only to point to their own inadequacy in rendering the language of nature, but also to brightly flaunt their rhetorical ethic, displaying an authentic artificiality which keeps the otherness of the non-human world at a respectful distance.
• The Imprint of the ?Now?? on the Skin of Discourse: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Nathalie Cochoy p. 33-49
  Dans Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, le motif récurrent de la peau apparaît non seulement comme une métaphore de l'écriture mais aussi comme un procédé poétique illustrant l'engagement des mots dans le monde sensible. Loin d'isoler le texte dans l'intransitivité des métadiscours, le retour réflexif de la prose sur sa propre élaboration concourt à révéler la substance malléable du langage et son ajustement immédiat aux métamorphoses de la nature. Dans leur danse performative, les collages intertextuels, les dévoiements anamorphiques et les jeux rythmiques ou comparatifs présentent ainsi le projet éthique qui oriente l'écriture d'Annie Dillard – la révélation de la leçon de survie que la nature peut donner à l'homme.
• L'ordinaire, l'étrange et le sublime dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass - François Gavillon p. 50-65
  With collections of short stories such as In the Loyal Mountains or, more recently, The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has continuously explored the multifarious connections between man and nature. The purpose of this paper, through the analysis of a selection of his most compelling stories, is to examine three recurring and concurrent modalities. We have chosen to term them as follows: the ordinary, or the focus on the—apparent—simplicity of both the writing and the lifestyle celebrated in the short stories; the uncanny, which takes the characters, and the readers along with them, into near-magical, sometimes unsettling, sometimes wondrous, experiences; Clément Rosset's investigations into the “idiotism” of the real are also examined in this light; and the sublime, in its rhetorical and esthetic acceptions, which, in a quietistic post-luminist mode, makes the reader the privileged beneficiary of the writer's art and love of the wild.
• Les paysages en creux de Breece D'J Pancake : la nature à l'épreuve de l'h/Histoire - Véronique Béghain p. 66-77
  While Pancake's stories have been read by some critics as shaped by the strictures of the rural Appalachia where he was raised and which his fiction takes as backdrop, this paper argues that the closure they distinctly delineate is more specifically rooted in the author's manipulation of landscape and animals as essential providers of the “unity of effect or impression” singled out by Poe as a defining trait of the short story as genre. Used as metaphor, the hollows and fauna of West Virginia are not so much contriving as they are instrumentalized by a writer whose fictions appear more crucially constrained by generic codes than by regional determinism.
• Les paysages nécessaires de William Gaddis - Brigitte Félix p. 78-95
  The purpose of this paper is to question the significance of the representation of nature in William Gaddis's fourth novel, A Frolic of His Own, by focusing on the narrative and descriptive sequences that seem to offer a different kind of textual landscape compared with the dialogues and legal documents the narrative is replete with. After studying what kind of nature is actually present in the novel, we will try to show that what is at stake is a poetics of fiction writing in the way “nature” is made into a literary and necessary landscape that is the result of a complex textual fabrication.
• Bibliographie sélective - Michel Granger, Tom Pughe p. 96-98