Reading "Hope": Hovering between Finalities and Futures in Hintze Hall

Abstract

After briefly setting up the background context, this short presentation outlines some of the questions guiding a meditative piece on the blue whale skeleton on display in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in London. It is part of on-going, comparative work making culturally inflected readings of whale – and particularly blue whale – skeletal exhibits in natural history museums and situating these readings in relation to late twentieth and early twenty-first century cultural productions about whales.

Bio

Elspeth Tulloch is an Associate Professor of Canadian Literature at Université Laval. Her on-going eco-critical research interests deals with extinction narratives.

I recognize that the land around which this on-line conference is gathering in spirit is on Treaty 6 Territory and Homeland of the Métis. I also respectfully acknowledge that Quebec City, where I work and write, and where I seek to walk with as much lightness as I can, is situated on Indigenous territory. It has been a meeting place for the Innu and other Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. I express my gratitude to the Huron-Wendat Nation, who, following a time of migration and resettlement, have received countless peoples on this land for which I share a deep sense of care.

Baudelaire's Seine, Distributary of Hugo's Rhine

Abstract

Baudelaire’s famous poem “Le Cygne” [The Swan] (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil], 2nd ed., 1861) is considered here as a departure from Victor Hugo through the lens of the natural formation of a watershed, or, as the Oxford English Dictionary simply but somehow poetically puts it, “a water-parting.” Reading Hugo’s travel narrative Le Rhin [The Rhine] (1845) as a specific riparian site of influence for Baudelaire, I suggest that the severe diminution of nature in “Le Cygne,” even if dedicated to Hugo and thus ostensibly a tribute to him, is a counter song of heightened consciousness to Hugo’s grandiose yet vaporous meditations on the Rhine. If Hugo can be read as a “nature poet” in his romanticized views of landscapes, Baudelaire is a proper environmental poet due to his acute awareness of the havoc wrought by urban planning and industry. To the ethereal banks of Hugo’s utopian, Europe-unifying Rhine, Baudelaire answers with a Seine of polluted water and the dead weight of massive toppled stones symptomatic of a fractured Paris.

Bio

Karen Quandt is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of French in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Wabash College. Aside from studying the aesthetics of landscape and intersections between romantic poetry and painting, she also researches ecocritical approaches to 19th-century French literature. She has contributed various articles and chapters on Lamartine, Hugo, and Baudelaire. Most recently, her article on Alpine ecology in Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste appeared this past November in the “Ecoregions” issue of Dix-Neuf.