Introduction

Pauline Goul is Assistant Professor of French Literature at The George Washington University. She specializes in early modern French literature and environmental criticism, and she has published pieces in the Forum for Modern Languages Studies and in volumes like Global Garbage and French Ecocriticism. She is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled The Anxiety of Waste: New World, Environment and Literature in Renaissance France.

Phillip John Usher Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture and of Comparative Literature at New York University, where he is also Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture. He is the author, translator, or editor of nine volumes. His most recent monograph is Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).