French Crime Fiction’s Extractive Narratives
Date and Time
Location
FRANCE AND THE WORLD
SPEAKER: Lucas Hollister, Dartmouth University
This paper discusses the oft-overlooked history of French crime fiction engaging with ecological thematics and set in and around extractive industries. In dialogue with emergent scholarship on “noir ecologies” and the French écopolar and pétropolar, Hollister surveys the long history of crime fiction’s fascination with extractive environments and discusses the genre’s relative marginality in the environmental humanities. He then turns to two case studies that suggest how ecological thematics inflect Left and Right-leaning crime narratives.
About the speaker
Lucas Hollister is an associate professor of French at Dartmouth College. A specialist of French prose fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, his research spans a variety of topics related to genre fiction, popular culture, critical theory, ecocriticism, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019) and of articles in journals such as PMLA, Genre, Romanic Review, The French Review, French Forum, Fixxion, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.