Bénédicte Meillon, "Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Gina Stamm
Guest: Professor Bénédicte Meillon
Book Discussed: Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Date: September 5, 2025

In this episode, Gina Stamm interviews Professor Bénédicte Meillon about her groundbreaking book exploring how contemporary literature engages with the more-than-human world through the twin prisms of "ecopoetics" and "reenchantment." The conversation delves into the relationship between literature, sensory experience, ethics, spirituality, ecofeminism, and the concept Professor Meillon terms "liminal realism." Together, they discuss how stories can reshape perception, foster interdependence, and illuminate the shifting relationships between humans and the non-human environment, especially in times of crisis.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Origins and Significance of the Book

• COVID-19 as a Trigger:
  Professor Meillon began writing during the pandemic, picking up longstanding work that focused on the agency of non-human species and how periods of human pause (such as lockdowns) allowed people to hear the world differently.
  • "Covid was an important moment...a lot of people were really celebrating how they were paying more attention to the soundscapes of the world that we inhabit." (03:27)
  • She observes that lockdown made people aware both of "noise pollution" and of the return of wildlife, particularly birds, to urban soundscapes.
• Anthropocene Awareness:
  Meillon links pandemic reflections to broader themes in the Anthropocene: human encroachment, zoonoses, interdependence, and the planet's reaction to humanity’s actions.
• Storytelling and Reenchantment:
  The pandemic, for Meillon, highlighted a societal hunger for new narratives where "the planet was kind of reacting...forcing us to take other species into account in the way that we tell the stories." (05:00)

2. Corpus and Cross-Cultural Approaches

• Intercontinental Focus:
  The book bridges French and Anglophone literatures, inviting cross-pollination between different literary traditions.
  • "I was trying to work at a crossroads between French and English writers...initiate conversations with colleagues that weren't reading principally English literature, but French literature." (12:34)
• Theoretical and Analytical Structure:
  The book is divided into three main parts: the first lays theoretical foundations, and the remaining parts are dense with close readings.
• Correcting Misconceptions:
  Meillon addresses misunderstandings in French academia about the origins and purposes of ecopoetics, emphasizing Anglophone contributions and the need for translating key works.

3. Ecopoetics, Senses, and the ‘Revival of Attention’

• Reenchantment as Sensory Revival:
  Central to the book is the idea that ecopoetics revives all senses—not just sight—and teaches renewed attention to sound, smell, and bodily perception.
  • "The texts that I wanted to bring into this book are texts that really sharpen our attention to the more than visual world that we're constantly immersed in." (24:18)
• Against 'Frontal Lobotomy':
  Critiquing logocentrism and the dominance of vision, Meillon invokes theorists like Brian Swimme and Joachim Berendt to argue for holistic, embodied modes of perception.

4. Ecopoiesis Explained

• Definition and Reach:
  Drawing on Jonathan Bate and others, ecopoiesis is described as art (literary or otherwise) that emerges from attentive, dialogic engagement with more-than-human nature.
  • "Ecopoiesis...is the notion that art emerges from paying attention to and writing or dancing or filming in conversation with the more than human world." (22:27)
• Ethical and Ecofeminist Dimensions:
  Meillon ties ecofeminist practice—valuing the body and sensitivity, often marginalized—to the cultivation of attentiveness in both readers and writers.

5. Ecopoethics, Ethics, and Spirituality

• Connecting Ecological Literature and Ethics:
  For Meillon, ethics and spirituality are inseparable from ecopoetics: literature can create a sense of kinship and relationality that transcends materialism.
  • "Eco feminist doing away with notions that the body and the mind are different things...this feeling of connection we can seek because we feel the pleasure and the aliveness..." (28:01)
• Religion Revisited:
  She unpacks the etymology of "religion" as both "binding together" and "rereading," proposing literature as a vehicle for spiritual and ethical reconnection.

6. The Concept of Liminal Realism

• Moving Beyond Magical Realism:
  Meillon introduces "liminal realism" as a form of magical realism that centers on thresholds—especially those between human and non-human experience.
  • "Liminal realism does all of...magical realism, but it's magical realism taking place at a crossroads between human and non human worlds." (32:25)
• Colonial Problematics of ‘Magic’: She discusses why "magical realism" can be problematic, especially for non-European worldviews, because it frames other ontologies as superstitious.
• Key Criteria for Liminal Realism:
  (Full list at [40:08])
  1. Crossing Worlds: Main characters move between human and more-than-human worlds.
  2. Initiation and Liminality: Characters undergo initiation rites, reshaping their selves/worldviews.
  3. Embodied Sensitivity: Characters are hypersensitive, often with atypical bodies/minds.
  4. Dream/Reality Thresholds: Key events happen at dream-reality borders, accessing the "ecological unconscious."
  5. Dialogic Prose: Ecopoetic narratives intertwine poetry, science, and myth.
  6. Self-Reflexivity: Texts are aware of—and reflect on—their own enchanting powers.
  7. Braided Ontologies: Deliberate blending of scientific, animist, and empirical knowledge systems.

7. Weaving and Braiding as Poetic and Theoretical Metaphors

• Weaving as Worldmaking:
  Meillon examines the metaphors of weaving, braiding, and entanglement, drawing on myth (e.g., Spider Woman), literature, and etymology (from “textile” to “text”).
  • "There's a matrix, there's flesh, there's different threads, there are different dimensions that are entangled, and that forms what Merleau-Ponty has called the flesh of the world..." (52:53)
• Ecofeminist and Craft Roots:
  She highlights the connection to traditional crafts and dialogic literary structures, relating both to ecofeminist politics and the “flesh of the world.”

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the COVID-19 Pause:
  "I was really struck with the number of people who said they were able to...pay more attention to the soundscapes of the world that we inhabit." —Bénédicte Meillon (03:27)

• On Ecopoiesis:
  "Art emerges from paying attention to and writing or dancing or filming in conversation with the more than human world." —Bénédicte Meillon (22:39)

• On the Purpose of Reenchantment:
  “The stories that we tell about ourselves and the world that we inhabit really influence the way we inhabit the world—that those are entangled.” —Bénédicte Meillon (09:23)

• On Magical vs. Liminal Realism:
  "Who gets to say what's realistic? What belongs to the real world, what is natural? Who gets to say what's magical?...I was interested in looking at what's going on in these works that are works of fiction. Let's not forget that." —Bénédicte Meillon (34:02)

• On Weaving and the Flesh of the World:
  "Everything in the world is always...there's a matrix, there's flesh, there's different threads, there are different dimensions that are entangled, and that forms what Merleau-Ponty has called the flesh of the world, which is an ongoing dialogue." —Bénédicte Meillon (52:53)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:27] — COVID-19, human pause, and the return of the non-human world; origins of Professor Meillon's project
• [12:34] — Development of the book's corpus; bridging French and Anglophone traditions
• [20:21] — The importance of the chant and the senses; Jean Giono's Song of the World
• [22:27] — What is ecopoiesis? How does it reconnect us to the world through art?
• [28:01] — Ecopoethics, ethics, and spirituality; religion as relating and rereading
• [32:25] — Liminal realism: definition, critique of magical realism, and criteria
• [40:08] — In-depth: Seven criteria for liminal realism
• [48:52] — Weaving and braiding as metaphors: ecofeminist, mythological, and philosophical threads

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Conclusion & Further Reading

This conversation with Professor Bénédicte Meillon offers a richly textured exploration of how literature can foster renewed attention to the world, challenge anthropocentric worldviews, and encourage ethical and spiritual interconnection with the more-than-human. Readers interested in ecocriticism, affect, sensory studies, and ecofeminist theory will find the episode especially rewarding.

Further Resources:

• Professor Meillon’s academic work: [Personal Email Provided at 53:19]
• Projects: “Seymour Blue” (oceanic and aquatic ecopoetics) and “Dancing Bodies of Water” (multimedia research-creation)
• Forthcoming work: Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene (entry on Liminal Realism), Blue Humanities Handbook (Routledge), and creative writings (see JSSE journal).

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This summary preserves the vibrant academic exchange and depth of thought while providing a map for listeners—and readers—new to Professor Meillon's work and to the evolving field of ecopoetics.

Transcript

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[Gina Stamm]

Hello everyone and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Gina Stamm, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and today I will be talking to Professor Benedict Meillon about her book Eco Poetics of Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth, published in the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series of Lexington Books Roman and Littlefield imprint in 2022. Professor Meillon who has edited and co edited numerous collective works and authored dozens of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, is professor des Universite at the Universite Danger and the current president of easelsi, the European association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment. For many years, she participated in the coordination of the OIKOS Research Group in Ecopoetics, Ecocriticism and Ecoanthropology attached to the Kresan Lab at the Universitat du Perpignan Via. It is a pleasure to talk to her today about her work. Welcome, Professor Milion.

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Oh, thank you very much.

[Gina Stamm]

And so in the introduction to your book, you take us back to the project's birth at the moment, at a moment in the COVID pandemic and lockdown that saw some celebration of the return of the non human to spaces they had been excluded or expelled from in large part. Could you tell us what brought you to Ecopoetics broadly and this project in particular? And if you would like to also talk about the significance of that moment.

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Thank you very much. That's a good question. So I actually started writing the book during COVID the COVID crisis, because I was on sabbatical at that time. It's not really what triggered the writing in itself, which, you know, is based on a project that had started in 2015, I would say. But Covid was an important moment. And in the book, I start from, you know, what was going on at that time, specifically, as you mentioned, how the lockdown had really made space for more than human species to manifest themselves in the, you know, and even in urban areas. And I remember that at the time, I was really struck with the number of people who said they were able to because they had more time, but because the world had come to a hush, there were no more or hardly any engine noises. Planes had been brought to a halt. Most of us were at home, not working, we're working from home. And a lot of people were really celebrating how they were paying more attention to the soundscapes of the world that we inhabit. And what really came up a lot was people saying, oh, I'm hearing all the birds on the street or in my garden. And then there were studies that showed. And, you know, as people were saying that, I kept wondering, well, is it simply that people are listening and because we've gone more quiet, they're hearing what they know, what normally slips our attention, or are birds also really singing more? And it turned out that studies have shown that, logically enough, because birds occupy territories of sound and we'd freed a lot of acoustic niches and frequencies on which birds like to express themselves. They were actually freer to sing. So, of course, I was writing on ecopoetics river enchantment, which has to do with paying attention to the soundscapes of the world, amongst a lot of other things. And I thought that was a really interesting moment. The other thing is Covid, because it started with the agency of non human matter virus that took on global importance, really forced people, at least temporarily. We might feel disappointed how long that awareness has lasted, but for a while, people were really aware of the agency of non human species. And that, to me, that was a time where it seemed that we were all being asked to reconsider how much space and how many of the resources and how much of our activities we could just keep on without thinking about how we're interconnected with other human species. There was this moment also where people were becoming aware that Covid was a zoonotic disease emerging from wild places on which we have encroached because of our anthropic activities. So there was this whole hope also that Covid was a time that could bring reflection, more reflection on the ways that we're interdependent with other than human species. While this was happening, I was also struck with a number of people that were really interested in turning this into a story. What's jury what sort of story did we tell about the agency of a virus to bring the entire planet into this crisis? And there were a lot of people who were experimenting. There were those narratives where people were trying to suggest that this was one of the ways that the planet was kind of reacting to which, yeah, was reacting to our activities and our exploitation of nature. And that it was a reaction that was forcing us to take other species into account in the way that we tell the stories that basically they were telling the story. So this ties in with, of course, the Anthropocene, where we have come to realize that even though humans have written themselves into the Earth, even in geological ways, we cannot keep that going in the sense that more than human life reacts to the ways that we disturb the balances of different systems that form a complex planetary system. So it was really a time where a lot of people experience different forms of re enchantment in their daily lives. And people stepped back from their ordinary, accelerated work paces. They made room for attention to the more than human world. And I was really interested in how a lot of people became aware of the noise pollution that we're responsible for, which most people are kind of oblivious to. So, yeah, that kind of sums up why that was such an important moment for me to be writing this book and in fact, the birth of the project. So before then, I had been working on Magical Realism in a lot of different writers. Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Ann Pancake and. And others and crew. And at the time, I could tell that all this storytelling, relying on Magical realism was working from and away from disenchanted worldviews and toward reenchanted worldviews and reclaiming the fact that the human species is really a storytelling species and that the stories that we tell about ourselves and the world that we inhabit really influence the way we inhabit the world that those are entangled. So at the time, I was also, like you said, at the University of Perpignan, I was working in a lab, and I'd like to work collectively and not just go, you know, as a solo flyer into my projects. And it turned out that in my lab, a lot of people were interested in the notion that literature was a good place to explore how humans have been reading the Book of Nature, to put it in a nutshell. And the notion of Re enchantment brought attention. We started with the first conference on Dwellings of enchantment in 2016, and then there were other events. And that's how, personally, I really got into exploring the ties between Ecopoetics and Re Enchantment. So as I got into that, it was really. I was really interested in fictional works. And not just fictional, but mostly fictional works, the writers of which are also doing eco poetic work. They're working as poets that even though they're writing prose, a lot of what they're writing is in conversation with the more than human world. And it's a conversation that also makes way for other than human voices in a way that I think transports us as readers in Re enchanted Worldviews, where we come to terms with the notion that through modernity, the world has been disenchanted, where only human agency, consciousness, sentience, intelligence, matter. And in fact, what I've been really interested in is how what I used to be looking at through the lens of Magical Realism was really trying to affect and radically change the way we conceived of both how we write literature, but also just how we read our lives as an ongoing conversation with the human world. Great.

[Gina Stamm]

And your corpus includes both French and North American authors, as you've already evoked. So could you explain how you arrived at this set of writers? And in addition to being intercontinental in scope, your work goes back and forth between literary analysis and theoretical development. And its organized in three parts, the first being largely theoretical, and the other two, well, they're also theoretically dense. They are mostly made up of close readings. So could you talk a little bit about how you developed your corpus and also a little bit about the organization of the book and how it developed?

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Yes, thank you very much. So as I started working on an ecopoetics of Re Enchantment, I wanted to use ecopoetics as a way to read books that take us through from disenchanted worldviews to re enchanted worldviews. So while I was working on my corpus, that's what I was looking for, books that would very powerfully work on that. There were other criteria which I can go into. At the time, the lab that I was working in in Perpignan included a lot of colleagues that were not specialists of English literatures, but of French literatures. And. And so I was also trying to work as a French academic. French is my native language. I was trying to work at a crossroads between French and English writers. That was one thing. I was also trying to make room and initiate conversations with colleagues that weren't reading principally English literature, but French literature. And it came to me at some point that was a huge influence on the other side of the Atlantic, on some of the writers that I had been working on, Ron Raasch, David Abram and others, most likely some of which I've had confirmation through the writers themselves, that indeed, Jean Genot is kind of a starting point of a lot of their writing or how they see the world, or at least has been very influential. And the other thing is, in 2015, working within French academia, even though I didn't come to do ecocriticism and ecopoetics through a French academic setting, but mainly through the English studies field of specialty, it occurred to me that there were a lot of people in the Francophone world that were coming to ecocriticism and ecopoetics without having followed the birth of those fields in the mid-90s in the Anglophone world, and that there was a lack of translation of a lot of theoretical, conceptual books. A lot of books were not available in French. And it also occurred to me there were a number of misprisions as to what eco criticism was or Eco poetics was. One of our French Francophone Belgian colleagues, Pierre, wrote maybe the first essay in French devoted to ecopoetics, where he claims that ecopoetics is a French thing. And a lot of people have upheld that argument that it's a brancher take on literature, that they almost make it sound like people in the Anglophone world don't do eco poetics. And Pias Quinches tries to say that ecocriticism, which is more Anglophone, is more interested in the themes, the politics, I would add phenomenology, but not so much in the text itself. So the stylistics, the poetics, the narratology. And while I recognize that because of the way we are trained in French education, academia, generally speaking, French people doing literature really care to analyze the stylistic, poetic, narratological dimensions of literature. But that doesn't mean that nobody's been doing that in the Anglophone world. And in fact, as you know, eco poetics started in the Anglophone world. The first books by Jonathan Bate and then Scott Knickerbocker are amazing. Specifically, Scott Knickerbocker's work actually really does go into close readings of the ecopoiesis at play and what's going on with the language and the texture of the language in response and conversation to the more than human world. So one of my ideas in bringing Jean Jeune into that conversation, since all the other writers in my corpus are Anglophone writers, I wanted to clarify, reestablish work on this conversation, maybe translate also aspects and important contributions in the field. And for me, Jean Ginod, even though he's not at all, you know, we would now consider a contemporary writer, I could see in his work a lot of avant garde experiments, both in the way that he's definitely working on re enchantment, but also the way he experiments with non human perspectives and, and the attention that he pays within his texts to the soundscapes and the smell scapes, the odor scapes and the haptic and the texture, the materiality of the more than human world and how he obviously works in his prose, on making the world sing through his prose, where you're constantly being transported by the lyrical, but also the sensuality of his writing. So that's why there's that conversation between Jean Junot and much more contemporary writers, writers that on their end, I think qualify as either post colonial and or ecofeminist writers. So, you know, we're looking at widely different epochs. But I like to be. I like to pay attention also to, you know, I was trying not to circumscribe what I was doing within a purely contemporary and Anglophone context. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

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[Gina Stamm]

And there you've set up a little bit about the relationship between Ecopoetics and Re Enchantment and touched on my next question, which is about the importance of the chant, part of Re Enchantment or the chant, and also the importance of the senses throughout your book. And I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit for us.

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Yes, of course. So just a little anecdote. In 2016, when Ron Raasch was invited as a guest writer to the conference on Dwellings of Enchantment, the subtitle of which was Writing and Re Enchanting the Earth, Ron Raasch asked if he could read an excerpt from Jean Junot's the Song of the World, and it's that beautiful passage where Clara, the blind character, reads the birth of the spring and she read through her nose. And that, I think also was really one of the things that I wanted to look at is the notion of a song of the world in Jean Genot's writing that could be associated mainly with soundscapes, the biophony, anthropophany, and geophony that constitute the soundscapes that we inhabit. Whereas in fact, if you look at Jean Junot's writing he's translating or infusing. His writing is infused with the song, but also with the dance of the world and with the exuberance, the effervescence of the material world that goes much beyond just singing or song or sound. I don't know. Was that your question? Does that answer your question?

[Gina Stamm]

Yes, absolutely. And it also leads right into my next question, which is there's a quotation from page 113 of your book where you write. One of my central hypotheses is that by reviving all of our senses, ecopoiesis might help us correct both the logocentrism, or frontal lobotomy, as formulated by swim, and the ocular hypertrophy diagnosed by Joachim Berendt. And so there you're talking about this revival of the senses, but through that revival, you evoke the term ecopoiesis. What is ecopoiesis? And how do you believe it can be helpful to us?

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

So ecopoiesis, which I tend to mispronounce, probably, I tend to say ecopoiesis was first defined by Jonathan Bate in the Song of the Earth. He was looking at poetry that arises as a response to more than human nature. Ecopiesis can be also can take on many forms. It can be literary copies, it can be poetry, it can be prose, but it can also be film. It can be dance. It's really the notion that art emerges from paying attention to and writing or dancing or filming in conversation with the more than human world. Now, ecopoetics, what we're looking at is, of course, analyzing the mechanisms and the effects of that art that is produced by eco poets, if we want to call them that, and how that fine tunes our senses to the world's thick, fleshy physicality. And so, to go back to Brian Swim, so he talks about how modernity and modern education in the Western world, he compares it to a front frontal lobotomy. Like you said, I like the. I often think of it as a castration of our sensitive intelligence. And I do believe that outside of sight, we are no longer taught to pay attention to. And you know how attention is both a filtering in and out. So as you're paying attention to something, you're deliberately or unconsciously filtering out a lot of what's going on around you so that you can focus on something right? On the one thing that you're focusing on. And the texts that I wanted to bring into this book are texts that really sharpen our attention to the more than visual world that we're constantly immersed in. So we're constantly bathing into a world that is made of haptic sensation through touch, right? We're constantly feeling through our skin. We're proprioceptive animals, human animals. But proprioception is how we navigate the world physically with our bodies, and how our embodied intelligence actually includes and is ruled by, in part, our responses to odors and our responses to sight. So what I'm doing here is I'm trying to demonstrate how these books where the writing is so material, physical, they actually flesh out those. The tastes and the sounds and the smells of the world that we're often oblivious to as we go along in our daily lives. And, you know, I also work as an ecofeminist. That's a really important part of my work. On the side, I'm, you know, a dancer for fun. Not professionally at all, but. And I know that maybe having been raised as a woman and having often been told that I was hypersensitive, I'm very aware to the fact that the world that the education and the world we live in tends to induce hyposensitivity, and that a lot of us are taught by our education because now we're doing screens and the world is flat, that we're being taught not to be sensitive to those very important dimensions of the world that make us in which we are entangled whether we want it or not, and where there's a lot of intelligence so that the human animals that we are, I feel like we've kind of strayed from the gifts of our bodies that the body comes with. And, you know, we've evolved as human animals with a nose, we've evolved with skin, we've evolved with ears that are actually still picking up and can. So what I'm interested in is in those works that help us work toward re enchantment is also how they re educate us in a manner that we may become more attentive to those other dimensions of the flesh of the world.

[Gina Stamm]

And I'm so glad that you brought up the ecofeminist and ethical dimensions of your work. In chapter two, which is titled towards an Ecofeminist Project of a Rational re enchantment, you write, one of the aims of this book is to analyze contemporary eco literature that manifests a re enchanting, liminal realism compatible with indigenous worldviews, ecofeminist practices and theories, the ecophenomeology of Merleau Ponty and David Abram, as well as Karen Barad's agential realism. And so while we're touching on some of these in our discussion, this emphasis on compatibility between these different approaches highlights the relationship you emphasized between ecopoetics and ethics with the term ecopoethics and your reliance on religion or spiritual references and terms. So why do you see the relationship of ecological literaries to studies with ethics and spirituality is so important? You've talked a little bit about this already.

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Yeah, thank you. So, as a start, I want to just remind. I would like to go back over the etymology of the word religion, which in religare or religere, there are two words that people trace back the word religion to mean both, relating together, binding people, or right, as in a relational right. But also it also means to reread the world. Or. I was talking about the book of nature earlier. So for me, you know, there's a way to think of ecopoiesis as something that helps us reclaim the ways that we are interlaced with, tied to, interdependent, with the more than human world. So it's religious in that sense. And I feel like often we think of religion as the place where people experience spirituality. And I believe that you can experience spirituality in a lot of different ways outside of a set religion and literary experiences can really come with, you know, things that we tend to call epiphanies or moments of truth or revelations that also resonate in a way that is not just physical because we are embodied intelligences, but because we are also spiritual beings. And of course, now it would require that we agree upon what the meaning of spirituality is. And I think in general, spirituality is a quest for meaning, is a quest for feeling notions of kinship, knowing our place in the larger human world and feeling connected. And so we have material intelligences, but we also have what some people have called a soul, a psyche, call it what you want, but we do have mind, spirit. And in that eco feminist doing away with notions that the body and the mind are different things, in fact, the body and the mind work together. And so this feeling of connection we can seek because we feel the pleasure and the aliveness right now, alive makes us feel when we're physically connected to the more than human world. It can be, you know, even wind or. Or swimming in water, or just an encounter with a more than human being and the smells of the world. But it can also be that feeling of kinship or connection. And it always is to me, you can't separate the two. That has to do with our existence as being on a really fundamental level. So how do you go from ecofeminism to post colonial readings of indigenous writings? I think a lot of it is the writers that I'm bringing together and the theory that I'm tapping into, all of them insist that we navigate the world with our body, minds, and that you cannot extirpate human nature from within human nature. And there's that awareness in both areas of how much modernity through European Western standards, ideology and science have taught us a lot of wrong things about what it means to be a human being within a world that encompasses a lot of non human earthlings. I don't know if that answers your question.

[Gina Stamm]

Clearly, I, I think it does. And also with these questions of spirituality, it leads us to what I think is one of the major theoretical thrusts of your work, which is your development of the concept of liminal realism in ecopoetic texts. So could you tell us what this is and how it differs from other more familiar concepts such as magical or spiritual realism?

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Yes, thank you for that question. That's a really important one. So like I said initially, when I started getting into what I came to coin to term liminal realism, I was looking into texts, I was looking at texts that abided by the definition of magical realism, propounded mostly by Wendy Farris and her excellent work on the workings of magical realism. There were a number of problems with the term which Wendy Farris herself addresses of. It is. And it's both a problem and the power of magical realism is it lies in its oxymoronic nature. And I know. So you know your magical realism, you're bringing together events that appear magical by European standards within a context that is otherwise realistic by the standards of the Western world. A number of problems with that. Number one is I kept running into the problem where, where I was at conferences trying to look into magical realism. A number of people I would get the same, I would have these colleagues that just couldn't get how events in a book could be read as both magical and realistic. So the antagonistic taste is take, you know, it has to be either or. Whereas I'm working within an ecofeminist frame where things can be. And, and, and, and it doesn't have to be either or. The other thing is there's something potentially problematical Eurocentric in calling magical realism magical realism. A lot of people have rejected. People who write from non European positions have rejected the term because it does raise a very important question. Who gets to say what's realistic? What belongs to the real world, what is natural? Who gets to say what's magical? Because magical has often been used as a synonym for supernatural. And then those areas of the writer's production that get called magical get called supernatural. And they also get equated with superstitions. And I'm using quote unquote in superstitions. We're butting against, you know, colonial times, when anything that didn't adhere to European religion, worldview and science was deemed supernatural, magical and superstitious. So there are people like Toni Morrison, for instance, who's rejected the term because of that. And I was thinking of whether, you know, what we like to do as academics. We're always trying to come up with a new term. I was trying to think whether there was something about the specific magical realism that I was looking at that could maybe lead me to a different word than magical. So I still like, and I explain that in the book, the notion of magic, specifically, if you're going by David Abrams and Starhawk's definition of magic as a willful, deliberate act, where you're using art to affect, to change our consciousness of and our perception of the world, what's in front of us, what's around us, who we are, et cetera. But it's not magic as in, you know, supernatural calling on spirits or supernatural forces. It's just a willful shift in perception through art. So in that sense, magical realism is magical, and liminal realism is too. Now, magical liminal realism is a branch of magical realism. So basically, if you go to Wendy Faris's work and you look at all her very careful criteria that she's kind of listed to say this is the way it operates. Liminal realism does all of those things too. However, it's a branch of magical realism, the liminal realism that I got into. First and foremost, it's magical realism taking place at a crossroads between human and non human worlds. So it's always a mode where characters might experience what it's like to be a whale or becoming be. Maybe there's shape shifting, maybe there's transformational beings. A lot of things there that, of course, by the standards of European epistemologies, you know, we don't believe in shape shifting. That's impossible. But I was interested in looking at what's going on in these works that are works of fiction. Let's not forget that. Right. And I was looking at the fact that those works also arise and consciously braid ontologies and epistemologies that are considered incompatible. So naturalism, or our naturalist, modern takes on the world through a scientific, rational lens. And everything has to have been proven through science and been made visible so that we recognize it as being part of the world. But this is being brought together in the works that I study with ontologies and epistemologies that are more traditional and that bring in animistic stances, totemic stances, and that braid together also forms of traditional ecological knowledges, for instance, or empirical experience where men and women through their firsthand experience of the world because they grew up in the forest or because they work in a rural area and live in a rural area, that in fact these people have knowledges that affects the way they relate to the more than human world. So I've tried, very much inspired by Wendy Farris's work, I've tried to list the criteria that define liminal realism. And like I said, liminal realism is a branch of magical realism. And what I've come up with is these seven criteria. Do I have time to go into them?

[Gina Stamm]

Yes, and actually I was going to ask you about these. So this is perfect.

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[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Okay, thank you. So I'm writing this piece Forum the encyclopedia of the Anthropocene and I'm writing an entry that's going to be devoted to liminal realism. And in that piece, in that entry, I'm trying to explain everything I've quickly gone over. But. So if I list those seven criteria, number one is that with liminal realism, the main characters are going to move between human and other than human worlds. They're really at a. They move in and out of those two worlds, and often at the. At a crossroads, not just a frontier, because they can cross that frontier. Number two, the main characters typically undergo an initiation rite or an initiation experience. And that's where the term liminal comes in. So liminal, if you go back to the etymology, often means threshold, right? So I'm looking at these characters that move at the threshold between human and other than human worlds, but also that are liminal in the sense that they undergo an initiation rite or experience. And in that area, I'm tapping into Victor Turner's work when he studied Rites of Passages of First People. And he's looking at what's going on in the liminal period, which is the middle passage, the middle period between the beginning and the end of an initiation, right? Which he's building on Van Genev, another anthropologist. So, you know, in an initiation, right, the initian gets separated from their community. They undergo the initiate, the initiation, right? Proper, where their worldview and their sense of self gets entirely reshuffled. And at the end of that, they reintegrate. They get reaggregated into the world that they've left for the moment of the initiation. And so I came to notice that there were all these books that we could have looked at as magical realism, where a lot of what would be considered magical, in fact, had to do with the fact that these characters were undergoing a very extraordinary experience which qualified. Qualified, sorry, as an initiation, right. And that through that initiation, there were different factors coming into play, but it would trigger awareness of their belonging to a multispecies world and really sharpen their sense of being in the presence of more than humans. Number three. So the main characters embody various forms of hypersensitivity, and they're often atypical. Some come. They have a handicap of some sort, and they're rather extraordinary in that sense. They would qualify as hypersensitive. And, of course, I like to turn that around and say that they're just sensitive and that a lot of us are just the lack of awareness around sensitivity. So, number four, the events that are the most important in as much as that's when the conversation, the exchanges the crossing of borders take place between humans and non humans. Those events often take place somewhere in between dream and reality. So it's also a threshold moment in that sense, because it's delving into those threshold states that are between consciousness and intuition, or unconscious states of mind. And in fact, what they're doing in those scenes is those scenes really make room for intuition and for access to what Theodore Roszak, who pioneered ecopsychology, has called the ecological unconscious. So that's a very important part of liminal realism, is through an initiation rite or experience, the main character has access to that part of their unconscious, their ecological unconscious, wherein we still know that in fact, we have never been severed from the more than human world. So some of the revelations and experiences is sort of a liberation or making consciousness part of what we know deep down in our ecological unconscious. Number five. So I'm looking at novelistic prose in the form of short stories or a novel. Right. One of the theoreticians of narratology that's really important is Mihail Bartin, and he's come up with the notion of dialogism. He's looking at all the different strands, threads of discourse that are interweaved within the text that is turned into a novel. Right. And what I was really interested in is the dialogism, this interweaving of different forms of discourse in the text that I'm looking at how they interweave, poetic, mythical and rational takes on the events and on the world. So there's a constant interweaving of poetry, science and myth. A lot of the characters at hand have some scientific training. Sometimes they're just scientists outright, or they have traditional knowledge. And they also often are poets, artists, singers, musicians, dancers. So their experience, often there's an overlap in their experience that allows us to read what's going on. If you need a rational take and you need to step back. Wait a minute, what's going on? Well, often, because of this careful interreading of poetry, myth and science, you can kind of use different readings that thicken our interpretation. So it's not just rational or just poetic or just mythical. And the mythical part is really important because in liminal realism, usually this comes in texts that deliberately question and renovate mythologies, the stories that we've heard, that we've told and that really foreground the relationship between an experience and how that resonates and to a certain extent may be shaped by a story or a myth that we've told. So that's number five. Number Five is dialogic, ecopoetic prose that constantly situates us in between poetic, mythical and rational stances, including scientific takes on the world. Number six, because of everything I've said before, it kind of is logical. It follows that liminal realism includes self reflexive passages, which it's very postmodernist in that sense, highlight the enchanting power of art itself. So there's a lot of self conscious passages, self reflective passages, where the characters themselves are thinking over how they were affected by a dance or a piece of art or a song, or what they're doing with their storytelling or how storytelling has affected. So that. That self reflexiveness is also very important in liminal realism. And finally, number five. Well, I've kind of mentioned that before, but there's a deliberate braiding, reconciling of various ontologies. So you're going to find texts where characters can both be trained in plant biology, but at the same time they're embracing an animistic and totemic relationship with the world. So that kind of sums up the different forms of liminality.

[Gina Stamm]

Thank you so much. That was great. And we're coming to the end of our time here. But you brought up in that answer this question of weaving or braiding, which is a metaphor or image that's really running throughout your work right alongside the idea of the chant or the song. And you explicitly thematize this in chapter 11. So could you tell us a little bit more about what weaving means for you in an ecopoetic sense and how it relates to re. Enchantment?

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Yeah, thank you. I mean, that would be. I could write a whole book about that. So I'll try to be concise. I did, if you're interested, write the foreword to a book edited by Caroline Durandrus and Margot Lowers. It's called Weaving Words into Worlds where I tried to. And that was a title that I had suggested back then, Weaving Worlds into Worlds, where I specifically try to bring together some of my takes on that image, that metaphor of weaving. I think a lot of it has to do with 20 years ago I was working on some of Barbara Kingsolver's writing and I got really interested in the figure of the archetypal figure of Spider Woman, creation goddess, and a lot of Navajo Pueblo, more generally, cosmogonies. And in one of the stories or vision of Spider Woman has to do with the way she sings a spider. Spider Woman creation goddess is a woman, is a spider sings and thinks the world into being. So her thinking is sort of. Is A sort of vibration is a song. And out of her singing the world, she forms the matrix of the world. It really is a creation goddess. And I thought that was a beautiful image for the creativity of the earth. You know, we could be looking at bio semiotics and how the earth is always putting out signs that create and help the world create and regenerate itself. Of course, if we're looking at weaving. Also, I like the idea of the notion of threads. I was briefly mentioning a take on literature through dialogism, where you can untangle when you're analyzing literature, the different threads of discourse that run, and some will be hidden for a while and they'll resurface through one character's discourse or through a different episode or a narrator. But you have all these different discursive threads that are braided. I think there are. For me, weaving and braiding are somewhat similar metaphors. The other image that I use a lot is that of entanglement. And you can see where in those images, right. There's something in common where you have different threads that are entangled, interlaced, Interweaved. Right. Or braided. Let me think if I'm thinking of. Oh, yes. When I was. I also got very interested in the notion of weaving when I was reading. I started reading Polygon Allen, the Sacred Hoop, for instance, where in the Sacred Hoop. And the notion of weaving is really important. I think all that came together. Of course, there's also the notion that weaving is a craft. It's an ancient craft. A lot of weaving traditionally have been done by women. So as an ecofeminist, I also like those images that remind us of, you know, feminine crafts. And there's nothing specifically feminine about writing, obviously. But for me, yeah, it's an image that really. It has to do also with, so, you know, texteri, that a text etymologically comes from texteri. And texteri is the same etymology as. The same etymology as texture and textile. So for me, it also, when I'm using weaving and even the notion of spider woman, it has to do with the fact that everything in the world is always. There's a matrix, there's flesh, there's different threads, there are different dimensions that are entangled, and that. That forms what Merleau Ponty has called the flesh of the world, which is an ongoing dialogue, of course, between perceiver and perceived. I don't know if that answers clearly.

[Gina Stamm]

Your question very clearly and very beautifully. And I could talk to you for another hour about this book, but I think we should wrap up. And I want to thank you again, Professor Meillon, for coming to talk with me today. And just Professor Stamp, to ask if there are any projects you would like to inform the listeners about or if there's anywhere they can find you in your work.

[Professor Benedict Meillon]

Thank you so much for asking that. I mean, if you just Google, you'll find most of my work online. If anybody wants to write my paper, email is B E N E n e I double l o n mail.com and right now I am running projects. It's a tentacular project called Seymour Blue, and it has to do with blue, that is oceanic and Aquatic Ecopoetics. The project is based at the University of Angers where I work. And I'm also involved. We were working on it last week in a research creation project that's it's a multimedia project involving photography, dance, video and writing. It's called Dancing Bodies of Water. And we're hoping to inaugurate an exhibit sometime in the spring. And yeah, I don't know. I have that Liminal realism entry that will come out in the Anthropocene Encyclopedia in the next few months. I'm also writing a piece for the Blue Humanities Handbook for Routledge that is being directed by Sydney Dobrin. I'm writing a piece on Blue Eco Poetics, which will have some of my work there. And if you're interested, I also have a creative piece of writing that's going to come out in a jsse. So there's a journal with a short story in English, and it's a blue issue that we've devoted to Aquatic oceanic short story. And I have a piece there that's called Staying Afloat.

[Gina Stamm]

Wonderful. And I hope that our listeners will indeed search the seek those out. Thank you once again.