Zoopoetic Arches: Literature and Contemporary Floods

Session 1: Thinking About Animals
Moderator: William Marx (Collège de France)

Abstract

In the era of Mesopotamian and biblical narratives, the ark of survival was associated with the flood that wiped out nearly all living creatures, followed by a renewal of life and ethics. Having sailed through our imaginations and memories over the millennia, the ark is now imbued with new values and reinterpreted through diverse poetic approaches. From the fragile womb to the tomb—via the natural history museum, the merchant ship, the biobank, the interstellar spacecraft, or the library—the status of animals is constantly shifting, oscillating between melancholy, comedy, and anger: what connection exists between a strand of DNA intended to populate a hypothetical planet, the reconstruction of an extinct dodo, bulls crossing the seas between two rows of shipping containers, and a litany of exhausted breaths? We will examine these various motifs, exploring how the works give voice, space, or memory to creatures whose ultimate and fragile refuge might well be a poem.

Anne Simon

Anne Simon is a research director at the CNRS and a professor at the École normale supérieure – Paris Sciences et Lettres University. As a member of the République des savoirs, she heads Philo-FR (International Center for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy) and oversees the Pôle Proust and Animots blogs. She is the author of four essays on Proust, a book co-authored with C. Détrez on representations of the female body, and *Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique* (2021; reprinted by Gallimard, “Folio Essais,” 2027). Anne Simon has published approximately one hundred articles on zoopoetics and co-organized the international conference “Human-Animal” hosted by the 20th and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies (San Francisco, 2011) as well as the Biennale du Vivant (Paris, 2023 and 2025). She has also edited six special issues: “Face aux bêtes,” *L’Esprit créateur* (2011); “Humain-Animal,” *Contemporary French and Francophone Studies* (2012); “Écopoétiques,” *Fixxion* (2015); “Zoopoétique,” *Revue des Sciences humaines* (2017); “A Decade of Zoopoetics,” Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises (2025); “Literature and Satirical Zoomorphism,” Colloques Fabula (2025). She is currently writing an essay on literary reinterpretations of the Ark and the Flood.