20th EASLCE Webinar: Unruly Plants. Interspecies Relations as Challenges for Literary and Cultural Studies


Dr. Joela Jacobs, University of Arizona (USA) & Dr. Solvejg Nitzke, University Dresden (Germany)

Time and Date: 21.06. 16:00 CET (Central European Time) 

Even if, as a gardener, you might be well aware that plants are anything but static, most of us look at plants as slow, if not still beings. That is, if we look at them at all. While we consume and admire, maybe even appreciate vegetal beings, humans rarely consider vegetal beings as agents in ‘our’ stories. But what if plants were to refuse to stand still, if they assumed roles that exceeded the realm of the decorative or useful to become a menace to humans? What if plant love went beyond the boundary between species, and vegetal attraction became fatal? Plant sex and plant horror seem to lurk at the fringes of the literary consciousness. Yet, within an ever growing appreciation of the ‘weird’ effects of ecological crises and new insights into plant abilities, human-plant relationships offer ways through which to (re)discover the role of vegetal poetics in literary fiction as well as what happens to both literature and humans when plants become unruly.

This webinar is about the potential and challenges of literary and cultural plant studies, viewed through the lens of plant horror and plant sexuality. We will discuss narratives centered around the horrific and erotic aspects of human-plant relationships in order to discuss how the reading and narrating of plants changes in light of recent scholarship and science.

Key Questions: 

What is a plant (in any given text)? Does it possess agency, intelligence and/or other qualities associated traditionally with ‘the human’? Which rhetorical and narrative devices are used to make ‘unruly’ plant behavior plausible? 

Are we dealing with monsters here, and if so, who/what is monstrous in the texts and why? How does focusing on plants change how we/you read a text. Are there limits to plant readings? 

When plants enter texts, can they still be considered plants, or do they become something else? What are the potential and the challenges of plant sex and plant horror, and (how) do these reach beyond the text?

Required Readings:

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: Rappacini’s Daughter
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Giant Wistaria
  • Ross Gay: Lily on the Pants

You will also receive a link to a padlet on which to include one unruly plant (story) for the seminar. 

Optional (Background) Reading:

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20th EASLCE Webinar: Unruly Plants. Interspecies Relations as Challenges for Literary and Cultural Studies


FURTHER READING

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Ecozon@ is a journal devoted to the relatively new field of literary and cultural criticism called ecocriticism. Ecocriticism can be broadly defined as the study of the representations of nature in cultural texts, and of the relationship between humans with other earth beings and their environment as seen in cultural manifestations. 

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