Anne Simon | From Zoopoetics to Ararat | CSN Lab | Yerevan | Armenia | 30 June 2026

Anne Simon

From Zoopoetics to Ararat: Literary Rewritings of the Flood and Noah’s Ark (20th–21st Centuries)

Cultural and Social Narratives laboratory (CSN Lab)

18:00, 30 June 2026

Yerevan, Armenia

• Report on CSN Lab website

• Abstract 

The historical catastrophes and ecological disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries have prompted many writers to return to the biblical imagery of the Great Flood. In the face of radical threat, Noah’s Ark stands as the ultimate refuge for survival, opening onto Mount Ararat and bringing with it a divine promise, and the renewal of life. This presentation will first revisit traditional interpretations of the Flood and Ark motifs. It will then explore the vast diversity of literary rewritings of an Ark whose values can at times be contradictory: salvation versus deadly exclusion, a shared world versus a rigid container.

Anne SIMON is a Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Professor of Literature at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS-PSL, Paris). She directs the International Centre for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy (Philo-FR, République des Savoirs) and serves as the editor-in-chief of the Animots research notebooks. In the early 2000s, she pioneered the integration of animal studies into literature, a field of research reflected in her later book Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique (2021). She has also authored four monographs on Proust and co-edited some thirty collective volumes, focusing particularly on the intersections between the novel, animality, and nature.

Anne Simon

Anne Simon est Directrice de recherche au CNRS et Professeure à l'Ecole normale supérieure (Paris). Responsable du Centre international d'étude… Lire la suite

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