Literature and nature: a dictionaric approach

Abstract

The notion of “lit&nature” makes it possible to bring to light an international corpus of hybrid texts with an uncertain and poorly identified status, neither truly “scientific” nor truly “literary”, which bear the mark of a tension between two modes of knowledge of nature. Taking note of the main difficulties which still prevent the development of a general critical method which allows us to think about this tension, the authors of the Dictionnaire de litt&nature (to be published by Classiques Garnier in 2025) propose to contribute, with a group of authors, to the effort to theorize the inscription of natural knowledge in literature. The genre of the dictionary is particularly suitable for this.