Habitat, Migration and Predation
Ecocriticism is a recent approach to cultural analysis that first emerged in the United States in the 1980s. It is based on a combination of ecology, a branch of biology, and environmentalism, a social movement that has arisen from judgements about certain practices in modern-day society. Research in ecocriticism investigates the way cultural expressions reflect the relationship between human beings and their environment. In this case, the analysis is applied to a collection of short stories published in 2003, La héronnière, by Lise Tremblay. The book offers a new perspective on the traditional opposition between rural and urban life in Québec. It chronicles three examples of the relationship between individuals and their environment – rural, urban, and neorural – through the eyes of three narrators observing an unidentified but symbolically significant village. Their different points of view on three dimensions of their environment – habitat, migration and predation – reveal their own particular relationships with nature as being based on domination, consumption, and appropriation.