Bad Plants
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22211579 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heather Sullivan (0000-0003-1890-9370, Trinity University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 12-36 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theory Now Journal of Literature Critique and Thought (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2605-2822 • E-ISSN: 2605-2822 |
| Publisher | Editorial de la Universidad de Granada (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.30827/tn.v7i2.28982 |
| OpenAlex | W4401143319 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
“Bad plants” represent the seemingly unexpected and startling forms of plant power overlooked by many modern, industrialized societies that treat vegetal beings as mere resources instead of animate, world-shaping forces. Since science fiction and fairy tales often explore more openly animistic visions of non-human life, such texts provide ample possibilities for reconsideration by critical plant studies of our human-plant relations both cultural and ecological. For example, both Jack McDevitt’s 2001 science fiction novel, Deepsix, and Ludwig Tieck’s 1799 fairy tale, “Faithful Eckart and Tannhäuser”, feature “bad plants” that bring human beings violently back into the plant cycles they assume they have left behind with advanced culture and/or technology. In McDevitt’s case, we find sexualized predatory flowers on an alien planet, and in Tieck’s, flower-filled caves containing Venus herself living deep in the forested mountain. The wildly sexual blossoms lure human beings back into their botanical cycles, thereby expressing and, simultaneously, hiding our ecological embeddedness that is actually quite mundane. The lurid visions of “bad plants” contain potentially profound, if convoluted, ecological truths about our full dependence on, and ongoing immersion within, the activities of the domineering green photosynthesizers
Animal and Plant Science Education · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |