Yale French Studies, Number 149/150 : Strange Landscapes

Number 149/150 of Yale French Studies investigates landscape relationally, as a way of being, vernacular improvisation, gathering of textures, terrain of extraction and resistanceDouble issue Number 149/150 of Yale French Studies examines the vistas that emerge when we set aside familiar aesthetic conceptions of “nature” (forests, mountains, gardens) and consider instead a variety of stranger landscapes—spaces forgotten or unexplored, deserts, littoral edges, industrial and postindustrial terrain, matter made radiant by nuclear toxicity, and wastes. Contributors to this collection engage landscape as something other than a mere view, backdrop, or container for a person. Their contributions reflect the strange uses to which lands, waters, and skies have been put throughout and beyond the former French empire. Temporally, geographically, and methodologically, the issue is wide-ranging and diverse: it spans topics as varied as the poetics of medieval tree grafting, the desolation and resistance of sixteenth-century New World mines, the ghostly “elephant-landscapes” of French modernist fiction, and the “broiling favelas” of a Caribbean post-humanist near-future. Likewise, the articles gathered here consider richly divergent genres and objects, including travel narratives, novels, multimedia installations, sculpture, photography, architectural ruins, postapocalyptic cinema, and documentary film.