Female Biologists and the Practice of Dialogical Connectivity in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer

Abstract

Interweaving three stories set in a small town community of the Appalachian mountains, Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer (2000) details its leading female biologists' attempts and struggles to emphatically engage science with nature. All three storylines start with parties in conflict that eventually reach compromise by coming to terms with the engaged entanglement of women with men, mind with matter, reason with emotion, humans with nonhumans, as well as environmentalist or scientific ideologies with theological or agricultural doctrines. Prodigal Summer accentuates the inevitability of interaction and adaptation to support the necessity of cultivating communicative response-ability and responsibility for productive change in attempts to realize a more sustainable future for all matters interdependently coexisting in the world.