Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: Thinking with Plants

Why the recent wave of interdisciplinary interest in plant life? This seminar explores the turn to plants within and beyond the humanities as a way to rethink natural and artificial intelligence, sociality, gender & sexuality, and the nature of sentience. We examine writerly techniques that engage plants both as rhetorical strategies and as epistemic devices for defamiliarizing animal-centric perspectives and facilitating insights into multispecies life. Readings from ancient myth, early science, literature, and theory reveal a wilderness of knowledge, where humans become inverted plants and trees grow downward from the sky.