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Digital Ecocriticism: Moving beyond anthropocentrism in the contemporary French novel

Project description

Bridging narratives and nature for a closer look at eco-literary dynamics

A pivotal concern in modern storytelling is the intricate interplay between literature and ecological consciousness. As narratives evolve beyond traditional bounds, their reflection of environmental nuances has grown more pronounced. Backed by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the DigEco project aims to review 700 contemporary francophone novels (spanning from 2000 to the present day) to analyse the latent influence of ecological discourse. Using tools and methods from the digital humanities, DigEco will employ an ecocritical methodology to answer questions structured around three research axes: biodiversity, places and nonhuman agency. The project will sculpt a transformative paradigm shift in literary analysis, bringing anthropocentrism into question.

Objective

The DigEco project will construct, enrich, and analyze a corpus of 700 francophone novels (from 2000 to the present day) using tools and methods developed in the Digital Humanities. This innovative approach will provide new insights into the influence of ecological discourse on contemporary fiction. Although recent studies argue that the environmental question is changing the novel beyond the thematic focus on ecology, to date, no formal investigations have been conducted on such large corpora.
DigEco will thus propose new critical perspectives on the capacity of literature to bring anthropocentrism into question. In order to achieve this objective, the project will be organized around three research axes: biodiversity, places, and nonhuman agency. These three elements are all bound to a shift in the traditional mimetic paradigm of the contemporary novel, diverting attention from a previously-dominant focus on human actions.
For each of these research axes, I will enrich the digitized corpus using named-entity recognition technologies and semantic ontologies in order to encode a lexicon in biodiversity and identify toponymies and names of animals and plants. Then, using various computational approaches, I will leverage semantic, lexicometric, and stylometric approaches to answer research questions elaborated through an ecocritical methodology. Using sentiment analysis, I will also study the emotions that characters express about concepts, places, animals and plants.
This project bridges two emerging fields in literary research Environmental Humanities and Digital Humanities and will constitute the first major study on the possibilities of dialogue between them. It will provide the largest set of data on biodiversity, toponyms and nonhuman agency in fiction in any language an unprecedented opportunity to question literatures relationship to anthropocentrism and to look at the contemporary novel through the prism of new tools and interrogations.

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01

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Coordinator

SORBONNE UNIVERSITE
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 211 754,88
Address
21 RUE DE L'ECOLE DE MEDECINE
75006 PARIS
France

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Region
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Paris
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

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