Seeds of Literature - "An Ecopoetics of Agency: Writing With the Nonhuman in Modernist and Contemporary Poetry"

12 octobre 2026 / 12 October 2026, salle E002

Visio conference link: https://visio.numerique.gouv.fr/dpb-pxml-etk

With the publication of her book, Sarah Bouttier will retrace how An Ecopoetics of Agency: Writing With the Nonhuman in Modernist and Contemporary Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2026) took shape. Several disconnected concerns came together around a single concept, agency; in D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in the non-human voiced in Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World and in an ecostylistics of attention. Following Bruno Latour’s account of agency without intention, which posthumanist ontologies have taken up, I propose an ecopoetics in which poems, poets and nonhuman poetic objects share agency. Poets write with the nonhuman rather than write about it, and readers read with it, responding to poems ethically and bodily.

Sarah Bouttier is an Assistant Professor of English at École Polytechnique (Institut Polytechnique de Paris) and a member of PRISMES (Sorbonne Nouvelle), specializing in literature and the environment, literature and science, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and modern and contemporary poetry. She has published widely on the nonhuman in literature and is the author of An Ecopoetics of Agency (Bloomsbury, 2026) and a coeditor of Microscopic Life in Early Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature and Performance (Open Book Publishers, forthcoming).