Écrire "la danse en rond": l'écopoétique à l'aune de Giono, Regain

This essay purports to chart some of the modes and methods of ecopoetics – an increasingly significant presence in the recent French critical landscape – through the analysis of Jean Giono’s novel, Harvest. By way of introduction, it seems important to establish a distinction between the North-American practise of ecocriticism and the more aesthetically oriented ecopoetics. Giono will thus be investigated in the key of the formal processes which inform his writing, whether discursive, stylistic and rhetorical. At the core of the analysis, the texture of metaphors which convey the dynamism of natural forces, and underscore the importance of the tangible world and sensory perceptions : metaphors indeed build a bridge between the Thirties of the novel and today’s cultures and contexts, heavily defined by environmental issues which beg for a re-assessment of the position of human beings in the world.