Bäume und Blumen als intelligente Wesen: Seit einigen Jahren beschäftigt sich auch die Kulturwissenschaft stärker mit der Gemeinschaft der Pflanzen. Wie dieses Forschungsprogramm unser Weltbild verändert hat, beschreibt die Literaturwissenschaftlerin Isabel Kranz in einem Gastbeitrag.
Plants have recently come to the fore in the humanities where the interest in the non-human fostered by ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthumanism has shifted to the vegetal. With increasing urgency, plants, their agency, and their cultural/natural impact are being studied by literary and cultural scholars. In order to radically rethink the status of the vegetal, this workshop investigates the place of plants in philosophy and literature, addressing both specific sites of the vegetal (such as the earth, the garden, or the middle) as well as the role of plants for our understanding of human-nature relations in the age of the so-called anthropocene. Particular emphasis will be placed upon questions of scale from an all-encompassing “planthroposcene” (proposed by anthropologist Natasha Myers) to minuscule parts of plants as a place for reflection in order to conceptualize the specific spatio-theoretical dimensions of the vegetal.
Both literally and metaphorically, plants form the basis of our lives as humans. Yet traditionally, their agency in our shared culture has often been overlooked. By considering the many diverse processes of translation plants partake in, this talk will propose new ways of thinking about and with the vegetal.