Abigail Fields is a PhD candidate in the French department studying representations of the environment in 19th- and 20th- century French-language literature. We spoke to them more about their eco-critical research, their reading practice, and favorite books.
What is your research about?
Broadly speaking, my research is interested in using literary analysis—studying literature and other public-facing writing—as a way to think about the environment in the public arena. My focus up to this point has been in 19th and 20th-century France and other francophone countries.
More specifically, my dissertation is about the representation of agriculture in the 19th-century French novel. I’m really looking at agriculture as a point of intersection to think about the environment, labor, politics, and class. Beyond just the place of nature in popular collective imagination, I’ve been thinking as well about the status of the peasant and of agricultural labor.
This all fits into a longer eco-critical tradition that tries to break down the perceived differences between nature and culture. Any conception that we hold about the natural world is actually incredibly social, and agriculture is an extremely rich instance of this. I think the nineteenth century was a major sea change in the way that agriculture and nature were understood in the French context. Using historical and literary analysis will provide a broader genealogy of the forces that have informed some of our own environmental perspectives today.
Why French literature? What was francophone literature like during the 19th century?
There is certainly this conception of some environmental moment in 19th-century American, English, and Russian literature. A lot of the texts in these cultures have been studied eco-critically, and it may feel especially obvious to us in our American contexts. Think about the 19th-century yeoman farmer, the sublime experience of the American West, the myth of the “uninhabited” landscape, and the colonization and theft of this land. This kind of environmental tradition has inspired a lot of subsequent literary and cultural critique, and the field has expanded massively to include many subfields, including feminist, queer, and decolonial environmentalisms, to name just a few.
What’s interesting is that this has not existed in the French context to quite the same degree. Even though France saw an intense period of industrialization over the 19th-century, there are surprisingly few ecocritical studies of the literature period. It is really surprising to me that this discussion is so lacking in French literary studies, and I’m trying to work this out within the French cultural landscape. What does this absence say about the state of French environmental thought? What can we learn about their engagements with nature at that time?
More broadly, I believe that literature and the arts are avenues for the public imagination. Theater, books, and newspapers inform the ways that people view the environment, talk about it, and transmit it down through history. There’s such an intimate connection between the content of art and the events unfolding in the wider world. The relationship runs both ways: literature is both reflective of its period, but can also be a novel intervention in an already existing conversation. So, I’m really interested in thinking about the novel as a historical document that allows us to recuperate histories we might otherwise miss.
You studied French and ecology and evolutionary biology in college. How has that influenced your work?
As an undergrad, I was initially interested in how to bridge the gap between the hard life sciences and a broader lay public. I started out studying ecology but later realized that it was not necessarily what I wanted to do. I had also taken some French courses, and got more serious about it through a series of happy coincidences and some really good mentors.
In short, the decision was not necessarily planned but has become really exciting now, because my work has been adapting some ecological concepts to reading practices. My dissertation is trying to build out a theory that approaches ecological practice as a kind of toolkit for understanding a literary work. Basically, this way of reading considers a text as an ecosystem unto itself, identifying the major actors in a work, their relationships, and the flow of focus or energy between them. Instead of focusing on the plot or specific instances of character development, I am identifying the relationships between human and non-human actors within the space of the text and trying to determine what they might show us about the world and our social-environmental relationships to it.
One of the texts that I focus on, for instance, happens almost exclusively in Paris. Approaching this as an ecosystem, you realize that its dynamics and relationships do not include nature at all. In doing so, the text also ends up making its own statement about humanity’s independence from nature.
When I started in university, I really wanted to be a science journalist to think about out how we might create accessible communication about ecological and environmental issues. I’m still very interested in moving beyond disciplinary and academic limits, especially with regards to the public humanities—creating conversations between scientists and humanists, but also with artists, organizers, practitioners, and farmers.
How do you think the environmental humanities program has impacted your studies?
I think it’s been huge. The Environmental Humanities program at Yale has been a major support for me, and one of the reasons why I was really excited about doing my doctorate at Yale. There was an openness in the program from the start, and I think that’s continued to be the case.
Working with the other professors, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in the program, I’ve felt this strong spirit of experimentation. If there’s an event you want to plan or a question you want to explore, they will offer you the support to pursue it. I think that this openness has really created a lot of space for me to try some different things out. We did an Environmental Humanities working group for a while just to create different spaces and events. Although these things haven’t always been tied directly to my dissertation work, this liberty to experiment has really transferred into my dissertation work. The program’s material and intellectual support has been really important for me.
Any favorite 19th-century French literary works?
I just finished writing a chapter on George Sand, who is this really incredible female writer. She was, I think, the first person in the history of French literature to write from the perspective of the French peasant— to make the peasant the hero of story There’s obviously all sorts of nuance there, because she herself was not a peasant and she wrote for a Parisian audience, and this question of representation is a big one I’m thinking about in my dissertation. But I think she was the first person who provided this complete rural world in the French novel. And if we’re talking about textual ecosystems that don’t include Paris, her works present a rural France that is completely autonomous. By moving away from the city, she captures a relationship to nature that is really different from a lot of work coming out of Europe in the 19th century, and even today.
I think most of her works are translated into English, and the novels are short. They’re readable and fun, so I feel like they’re a good place to start regardless of folks’ backgrounds with the literature of the period! I would definitely recommend the read.