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False Paradises: The Capitalocene and Marketing the Margins in Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing

Dr Laura Kennedy, University College Cork

Monday February 16 2026, 5.15-7 pm, E002 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus

zoom link:
https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/91699307953?pwd=mb0ivPzcHBbigWLn5faxFDvYa3864t.1

In his 2005 short story collection, Sightseeing, Rattawut Lapcharoensap digs beneath the picture-perfect imagining of Thailand that has long been packaged for Western tourism by shining a harsh light on its realities for local inhabitants. A paradise only for “fools and farangs, for criminals and foreigners” (Rattwaut 2005), Rattawut’s Thailand is one whose land, ecosystems, and species have been exploited for consumeristic, capitalistic gain. From the slowly drowning Andaman Sea islands to the ulcer-riddled elephants trained for tourist trekking, his collection highlights the ecologically disastrous repercussions of exotic tourism, revealing how the
paradisiac vision of Thailand is no more than an illusion created for farangs, one that is sustained to the detriment of Thai land, people, and species.

This paper will read Rattawut’s collection as an exemplar of the fallout of the Capitalocene: as a manifestation of the fundamental role that the pursuit of capital has played on the large-scale transformation of the planet and ongoing climate crises. In assessing how Thai landscapes and species (human and non-human) have been mined to meet the Western consumer’s orientalist fantasies, I will use Sightseeing as a case study to examine how “capitalist-colonialist economic relations have […] pressed every sector of nature, including other human beings, into service providing un- or underpaid labor for the accumulation of capital” (Arons 2023). To this end, this paper will argue that Rattawut’s collection stages the ecological dangers of marketing the margins (Huggan 2001), turning such exotic marketing on its head through showcasing the devastation it produces.

Dr Laura Kennedy is a Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at University College Cork. She is a broad-based postcolonial literary scholar. She is the co-founder of the research network Literary Dislocation(s) and is a member of the managing committee of the COST Action: ‘Literary multilingualism and social transformations in superdiverse societies’. Her research has been published in journals such as Comparative Critical Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and The French Review, and her first monograph, on the politics and poetics of language in anglophone and francophone world literature, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.

Healing the community through Indigenous ecofeminist literature

Brenda Kingery (Chickasaw) Gathering voices (2024). Acrylic on paper, 72 x 53cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Tatiana Viallaneix, Université de Picardie Jules Verne

Monday, February 9 2026, 5.15-7 pm, E002 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/94821638096?pwd=D1XBJTUVpdoMf1KtMvlRY1uQOnCDRf.1

The work of novelist, poet, and essayist Linda Hogan is deeply rooted in her Native American culture, that of the great Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. Although she was born in the neighboring state of Colorado, the author clearly emerges as the fruit and voice of the former “Indian Territory” and its specific, even exceptional, path of resilience and affirmation, to the point of becoming today a beacon of indigenous institutional and artistic vitality in the United States. From her own personal location, anchored in this unique territory, and in her powerful matrilineal culture, Hogan offers a broad ecofeminist approach and discourse, reflecting the complexity of the intersectional experience and Indigenous conversation, posing and addressing the entanglement of environmental, cultural, spiritual, social, economic, and sovereignty matters. Hogan draws on the sources of oral literature, cultivates it, and gives it a modern vitality, familiar and rooted in humanity. This accessible and lively oral literature plays its role to the fullest, that of building community by instilling in it mythical landmarks, values, and human depth. It is also driven by a clear desire to pass on and guide in order to educate or heal, both individually and collectively. Hogan’s storytelling thus becomes ceremonial.

Strikingly, each genre seems to have its own specific yet not exclusive function: while essays explain and teach, poetry speaks to the heart and soul, and novels depict the struggle for survival of individuals, communities, and the earth. Her novels stand out; while humor is not absent from them, they are the vehicle for the author’s anger and militancy. Hogan engages in political denunciations of colonization, assimilation policies, acculturation, and capitalism and its human and environmental destruction that afflict all of humanity. In her novels, women, especially matriarchs, are in charge, and they alone still know how to set the world right in the face of men often lost, weakened, or corrupt, and young people who lack direction. Ultimately, Hogan herself seems to take on these different roles—matriarch, activist, medicine woman—with her own characteristic agency, and her call for reconnection and regeneration takes on a universal dimension.

Tatiana Viallaneix teaches English language at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, and serves as an adjunct professor of US Cultural Studies and Native American Studies in the Department of English. In November 2025, she defended her doctoral thesis (CELIS, Université Clermont Auvergne) co-tutored by Anne Garrait-Bourrier (University Professor, UCA) and Rita Keresztesi (University of Oklahoma) and entitled “Vulnerability and survilience of Indigenous groups in Oklahoma (1830-2024)”. It follows a master’s dissertation on the Ghost Dance movement (“The Ghost Dance : The End or the Revival of Indian Nations?”) and papers dealing with the Ghost Dance; environmental protection among tribal nations in Oklahoma; ecofeminist author Linda Hogan (Chickasaw); the past and present of education in Cheyenne-Arapaho country in Oklahoma; the works and identity-related thinking of Cherokee scholar Dr. Joshua Nelson; the survivance and reconquest of sovereignty of Oklahoma’s tribal nations, as well as an ecocritical study of works depicting the Osage murders.

‘A Down-to-Earth Poet? On Seamus Heaney and the Land’

credit: Bobbie Hanvey, permission kindly granted by the Seamus Heaney Estate

Dr Sharon Jones, Stranmillis University College

Monday December 1 2025, 5.15-7 pm, E002 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/92458971945?pwd=6c9f51UxMHca4XU9NDnQ7i4kT8ldjM.1

Born into a farming family in rural Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is one of Ireland’s best known and loved writers, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and the prestigious Forward Prize in 2010. Although he moved away from the immediate locality of his birth, the place Heaney grew up in proved to be a rich source of inspiration throughout his work. Adopting a geo-critical lens after Westphal and Tally, this paper harnesses the concepts of mapping, translating and transcending to explore Heaney’s treatment of the land, drawing on close readings of poems included in Faber and Faber’s 100 Poems (2018). This beautiful collection curated by Heaney’s family offers a fine and accessible introduction to his remarkable poetic corpus.

Dr Sharon Jones is Senior Lecturer at Stranmillis University College in Belfast, and an inaugural Fellow of the Inklings Project, University of Notre Dame. She completed undergraduate studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University, and a doctorate in literature and theology at Ulster University. Sharon’s teaching and research interests include language, education and literature, and her academic and creative writing has been published in a range of journals and anthologies. Sharon serves currently as Chair of the British Educational Research Association’s British Curriculum Form.

‘As monstrous as orchids’: Floral Masculinities in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91)

Untitled by Gordon Johnson (GDJ) via Pixabay

Monday, March 10, 5-7 pm, E003 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus

https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/s/98971699027

Drawing on recent ecocriticism, this talk will examine the image of the solitary male in conjunction with the floral imagery that accompanies him in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91), particularly in the light of Michael Marder’s concept of ‘phytophallogocentrism’, which he uses to describe ‘how plants are involved in the twinning together of masculine sexuality with logos, and also in its deconstruction’ [The Philosopher’s Plant, 2014]. Ultimately, what will be revealed by the juxtaposition of floral and incel masculinities will be the futility inherent in both due to the interplay of Eros and Thanatos.

Dr Mathew Rickard is an ATER (Research and Teaching Fellow) in English Translation and Literature at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France. His research focuses on decadent literature and its intersection with queer masculine and male identities and behaviours. He is interested more generally in transgression and gender studies, with a particular focus on masculinities and queer theory. His recent research project culminated in the publication of his monograph, /Against the Grain: The Poetics of Non-Normative Masculinity in Decadent French Literature/ in 2021, based on his PhD thesis which he defended in 2020. Given the links between French and British Decadent writing, he is now beginning to extend this research in an anglophone and transnational context, comparing 19th century literature with that of the 20th and 21st centuries. His nascent research seeks to understand the figure of the incel and toxic masculinity in the writings of decadent authors such as Jean Lorrain, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde.

J.M.W.Turner, English Landscape and the Anthropo(s)cenic

Pr Frédéric Ogée (Université Paris Cité/Ecole du Louvre)

Monday 3 February, 5-7 pm, EOO2

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/s/98200092537

The growing importance of ecological concerns and its transcription into the new discipline of eco-criticism have identified the first half of the 19th century as a possible starting point for the Anthropocene, a period when the profound effects of the two Industrial Revolutions could be felt and seen, when man’s imprint upon Nature became primordial, essential and irreversible. What I wish to consider in this lecture is how the main subject of landscape art as Turner (and Constable) conceived it became an acknowledgement and exploration of this frictional inscription of man’s presence within Nature, a momentous re-classification of the genre, which endowed it with such remarkable philosophical and epistemological force that, in their eyes at least, it could be seen as modernity’s new form of history painting.
The remarkable coincidence, in Britain, of the industrial revolutions with the triumph of landscape as the greatest pictorial genre in the English school of art has led to the emergence of what has recently been conceptualized by David Matless as “the Anthropo(s)cenic”. Quite
strikingly, in Constable and Turner’s works, the “natural world’ is not considered as man’s “environment”, something peripheral surrounding man’s central presence, but Nature IS the center, and has become, or is restored as, the dominating force. This subtle displacement of what is central, of what matters, between man and nature is, to my mind, the main revolution introduced by the English landscapists of the period who replaced the centrality of man and of man’s control over Nature—the main characteristic of classical history painting but also the main tenet of colonialism—with the extraordinary symphonic force with which they endowed Nature in the “real” scenes they depicted.

Frédéric Ogée is Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and Ecole du Louvre. His main period of research is the long 18th-century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France’? The circulation of ideas across the Channel in the 18th century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006), and J.M.W. Turner, Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019), following a conference at the European Institute for Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. In 2006-07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre Museum. He is currently working on a series of four large monographs in French on 18th- and 19th-century British artists. The first one, Thomas Lawrence, Le génie du portrait anglais came out in December 2022. The second one, on the landscape artist J.M.W.Turner, will be published in 2025.

Repenser les liens entre nature et littérature à l’aune de l’écocritique

Sophie Chiari (Université Clermont-Auvergne)

Lundi 2 décembre, 17-19h

Lien zoom:
https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/96761114847?pwd=h7UnR5di3C2jAPc99fYRhfrRiJQhRn.1

Qu’est-ce véritablement que l’écocritique et en quoi est-elle novatrice alors que, depuis bien longtemps, la critique littéraire s’intéresse de près aux représentations de la nature dans les textes qu’elle analyse ? Pour replacer cette approche dans son contexte, il faut revenir sur les manières qui sont aujourd’hui les nôtres de repenser la nature à l’aune de la littérature, et inversement. Le concept d’Anthropocène, désormais érigé en outil littéraire, est utilisé pour relire certaines pièces de Shakespeare : l’idée, désormais dépassée, d’un face-à-face entre l’homme et la nature, a façonné des siècles durant les rapports entre l’humain et le non-humain. C’est précisément en opposition à cette vision d’une nature soumise par l’homme que l’écologie, qui sert de fondement à l’écocritique, est apparue dans les années 60 et 70, notamment par le biais de l’écologie profonde d’Arne Næss.  Un tel rappel historique est le préalable indispensable pour définir l’écocritique et en comprendre les différentes vagues. En effet, si le nature writing est la cible de l’écocritique de la première vague, les écrits de la deuxième vague, à partir des années 2000, ont, quant à eux, examiné des textes variés sans rapport évident avec la nature. De nos jours, l’écocritique continue de se réinventer, et les différences entre l’écocritique anglo-saxonne et l’écopoétique à la française forment la matière d’une nouvelle mouvance écocritique, à la fois poétique et engagée. 

Sophie Chiari est Professeur de littérature anglaise des XVIe et XVIIe siècles à l’Université Clermont Auvergne. Membre de l’IHRIM (UMR 5317), elle est actuellement Directrice de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Clermont-Ferrand (UAR 3550). Elle a récemment publié L’écocritique. Repenser l’environnement au prisme de la littérature (Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2024). Parmi ses autres publications récentes figurent Shakespeare’s Representation of Climate, Weather and Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), et Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2022). Elle a dirigé ou co-dirigé de nombreux ouvrages sur la première modernité anglaise, dont The Ecology of Dress in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries avec Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Elle s’intéresse tout particulièrement aux approches environnementales et travaille actuellement sur la manière dont Shakespeare et ses contemporains abordent les questions relatives à l’extraction, à l’appauvrissement des sols et aux énergies fossiles.

‘Against Nature,’ from the decadent to the post-human: Dorian Gray’s media ecologies

Camille Martin-Payre, Université de Tours, laboratoire ICD

Monday, March 18th, 5-7 pm CET, Lecture hall E002 + Zoom session

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/93988777343?pwd=UXc0L2wrSVNuUkVuVU44YW9FbUp3UT09

Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic program, decadent affiliations, and fin-de-siècle ethos give pride of place to the artificiality of art, the saturation of intermedial references and the promotion of the “unnatural” in life and art alike. His work would thus seemingly appear to lend itself poorly to an ecocritical reading, if such an approach is solely equated with the exploration and promotion of literary (re)constructions of “natural” environments. Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), through its supernatural inversion of the organic and synthetic properties of the main character’s body and its pictorial representation, translates, on the other hand, Wilde’s decadent aesthetics and ethics into a metaphorical narrative which systematically undermines any attempt at finding a stable
ontological paradigm. The cultural posterity of Dorian Gray, whose story has been continually retold and remediated through film, television, comics and other forms, showcases the evolution and subversion of the body/medium divide in ever-changing contexts of production and reception. In so doing, these adaptations coagulate Dorian Gray’s original polysemy into one enduring metaphor of the medium, a ubiquitous archetype uniquely placed to express contemporary anxieties about the technological annexation of bodies and their environments. From decadence to post-humanism, Dorian Gray thus comes to crystallize an unescapable “media ecology” (N. Postman) that necessarily grounds bodies and experience in discourse, and which might perhaps, ultimately, pave the way for a resolutely anti-nostalgic “ecology without nature” (T. Morton).

Why Litter? Paper Re-use in the Long Eighteenth Century

Dr Amélie Junqua (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens)

Monday February 26th, 5-7pm CET, Lecture hall E002 + Zoom session

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/94171429708

Thoughtlessly discarding whatever is considered as refuse comes as second nature nowadays, as attested by the materials dumped on streets, or washed ashore on the world’s beaches. The impulse to litter seems to be analogous to the way some animals leave by-products of their food consumption in the wild. Perhaps this might the reason why human campaigns promoting recycling and a more responsible behaviour never succeed, whether on the individual or collective scale – there will always be a lazy idiot to litter a pristine nature reserve, a city council to turn a blind eye to an unauthorized dumping ground, and an oil company to hire an unseaworthy tanker.
Looking towards the past may provide some further explanations for this failure. Studying the generation, re-use and circulation of one material which was considered “waste” in eighteenth-century England, i.e. paper, offers an insight into far more potent motivations to recycle. Scarcity, want and thrift motivated a now unimaginable creativity. C18 paper users — servants, housewives, surgeons, scientists, street-sweepers and thieves, as well as men of letters – will be contrasted with mid-nineteenth-century consumers of cheaper, and abundant machine-made paper.

Dr Amélie Junqua is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Language at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. Her research interests lie in British literary, material and cultural history of eighteenth century. Her work includes edited essays collections, book chapters and journal articles on topics including the career and writings of Joseph Addison, eighteenth-century periodicals and the history of re-use and recycling. Her upcoming book, co-authored with Geoffrey Day (December 2024, Bodleian Library Press), is entitled Too Good to Waste — Paper in Eighteenth-century England.

Ecofeminist Science Fiction and the Politics of Climate Denialism: Claire North’s The Burning Age

 Pr. Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

Monday February 19th, 5-7pm CET, Lecture hall E002 + Zoom session

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/91858499421

For her second visit to our seminar series, Pr. Vint will consider Claire North’s novel as an innovative contribution to recent climate change SF in its focus not only on the more ecologically sustainable future in which the novel is set, but also on the political threats that emerge from within that society that threaten to displace its politics and return to economics premised on extractivism. The novel thus both embodies elements of a long-established ecofeminist tradition based on reverence for the living world and functions as a critique of other recent traditions of geo-engineering which imagine we can solve problems of climate change through technology alone. In its focus on the political desire for economic hierarchies as one of the motivations for certain characters to advocate for a return to “burning age” industries, the novel additionally offers some insights into the politics of modes of climate denialism that exist today.

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, and a Professor and the Chair of English, at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is currently an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science and Popular Culture. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007), Animal Alterity (2010), The Wire (2013), Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed(2014); Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2020), and Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), as well as the co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011). Her co-authored book Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracywill appear in 2022 from Columbia UP. She has edited multiple books, including most recently Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life and the Politics of Reproduction (2022), After the Human: Culture, Theory & Criticism in the 21st Century (2020), and Science Fiction and Culture Theory: A Reader (2015). A recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research and its Lifetime Achievement awards, and she is currently working on a research project on speculative finance and speculative fiction.

La figure de l’accoucheuse à la croisée du care et de l’écoféminisme dans The Birth House d’Ami McKay

Elise Lepage (Université de Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)

Monday 22 January, 5-7 pm, E002 Room  and Zoom

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/92762248258

Cette présentation propose une réflexion sur les convergences entre les approches écoféministes et les théories du care dans les études littéraires. Ces approches privilégient les liens, les relations et soulignent l’interdépendance des êtres. Elles s’efforcent de montrer que certains individus – souvent les plus vulnérables –, certaines situations tombent dans les angles morts des approches universalistes et insistent au contraire sur l’importance de circonstances et facteurs particuliers. Ce faisant, elles entendent déplacer certains enjeux épistémologiques en valorisant notamment des démarches pragmatiques, aptes à répondre à des situations concrètes. C’est ainsi à la croisée des apports des écoféminismes et des théories du care qu’on propose une lecture de la figure de l’accoucheuse dans le roman The Birth House (2006) de l’autrice canadienne Ami McKay. Tout en contextualisant le propos du roman dans la région des Maritimes au début du XXe siècle, l’analyse mettra en exergue comment McKay a recours à certaines stratégies stylistiques pour aborder plusieurs problématiques liées à l’écoféminisme et au care, telles que la sororité, la santé et le bien-être des femmes et des nourrissons, ainsi que la confrontation de différents paradigmes épistémologiques.

Élise Lepage est professeure agrégée à l’Université de Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Ses travaux portent sur l’imaginaire géographique et le paysage dans la littérature québécoise et de la francophonie canadienne, notamment en poésie. Elle a entre autres publié une monographie, Géographie des confins (2016), co-dirigé deux collectifs et plusieurs dossiers de revues savantes. Depuis 2015, elle tient la chronique annuelle de poésie de la revue University of Toronto Quarterly. Elle dirige la collection « Voix savantes » aux Éditions David et est membre du comité éditorial des revues @nalyses et Québec Studies.