Zurück in den Garten : Mythos, Idee, literarischer Raum (Valerie Fritsch und Pascal Quignard)

Abstract

This chapter examines today’s passion for gardens through a comparison with the enthusiasm they stimulated around 1800. It seeks specifically to establish a relationship between the romantic reflection on nature and contemporary ecocriticism. To this aim I proceed in three steps which elaborate heuristically on three theoretical “turns”. The first section is based on the ideas developed within the framework of the environmental turn and considers the garden as a refuge and retreat in the Anthropocene era. The second section, inspired by the spatial turn, examines the garden as a heterotopia. Finally, in the third section of the article, I approach the garden by inscribing it in the rediscovery of the sensual world ( emotional turn). These theoretical considerations, or in other words, this history of the ideas of the garden, are applied to two examples of contemporary literary texts, the dystopian novel Winters Garten (2015) by the young Austrian writer Valerie Fritsch and the text Dans ce jardin qu’on aimait (2017) by Pascal Quignard.