Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies

Abstract

Randy Laist's Plants and Literature is the first book published in an innovative and important new Rodopi series, Critical Plant Studies: Philosophy, Literature, Culture. Edited by noted philosopher of plant life Michael Marder, this series seeks to raise ethical sensitivity about the instrumentalization of plants (agriculture, recent advances in molecular biology, genetic engineering, etc.) and initiate interdisciplinary dialogue that might parallel the way animal ethics has responded to the animal–industrial complex. The book illustrates that this new interdisciplinary approach (playfully named “vegetal ecocriticism” in a 2013 ASLE preconference seminar co-taught by Catriona Sandilands and me) will fast gain critical mass among ISLE readers in general, and scholars interested in material ecocriticism and biosemiotics specifically. As one might expect of a rapidly developing critical approach, most of the contributors to Plants and Literature are engaged in their doctoral studies or just entering the professoriate. This is understandable, given that—as editor Randy Laist notes—contemporary knowledge of the vegetal has largely been lost to corporate plant breeders resulting in a “defoliation of the cultural imagination” (10). The book's contributors dive into this void, and while the essays are not all uniformly strong, each author chooses a thought-provoking topic and writes about it with an enthusiasm that is infectious. Ecocritical scholars have long paid excellent respect to literature's varied renderings of flowers, shrubs, and trees, and a number of essays examining classic Anglo-European and American canonical literature (Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Rappaccini's Daughter”) build on this strong foundation. Other enjoyable essays examine myth, art, literature, film, and science fiction replete with depictions of evil plants, salvific plants, and human–plant hybrids (Little Shop of Horrors and Oryx and Crake). More cutting-edge essays read at the intersections of science studies and philosophy. Charlotte Pylyser's analysis of Brecht Evens's The Making Of, for example, engages with the plant-strewn pages of graphic novel art parody and raises questions about the ways the actual biological capacities of plants can be effaced when transformed into symbols that come to function in a purely instrumental manner.