Nature and displacement: an ecocritical approach to five works by Marie Darrieussecq

This dissertation examines the role of nature in three novels and two short stories by the French author, Marie Darrieussecq: Truismes (1996), Le Mal de mer (1999), Le Pays (2005), Connaissance des singes (2006), and Plage (2006). Using a holistic model, Darrieussecqs works address societal issues related to the current ecological crisis. Her works provide an image of humans in nature and embrace the global identity of humankind as it relates to the environment, including varied landscapes and non-humans. Each work offers a descriptive account of a protagonist or protagonists who undergo physical and psychological displacement. Darrieussecq uses displacement in order to absent the narrator, protagonist, and reader from a given social milieu so that he or she may gain a broad point of view of nature, society, and the evolution of both. By exposing the supposed oppositions that exist within nature, like femininity and masculinity or human nature and animal nature, she does not rely on simple, traditional dualities. Instead, she is an author sans frontires. In this way, her works reveal nature and human beings as processes.