Session: 1e
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.11
Chair: Gabriele Dürbeck
Panel Abstract: Violent, collaborative, communicative, slowly spreading, and monstrous plants enact various forms of “Vegetal Vengeance” in the plant narratives that we discuss in this critical plant studies panel. In that all large multicellular beings depend on unceasing vegetal activities to exist, and since they preceded our own existence by eons but seem to fade away into a dusty green backdrop for industrialized humans fascinated more by our mirror images in AI or other tech, we may be foolishly taking plant lives for granted. Even as we are now (re-)learning ever more about the intra-species collaborations and communication that plants use to thrive, those interactions enabled by a kind of green intelligence are not only supportive of other beings; no, they can also be aggressive and even dangerous. Indeed, plants resist, especially now, in the Anthropocene, when human activities are changing so many ecosystems across the planet. The stories that we address reflect our plant dependence and the elaborate collaborations that result, but they also play with possible vegetal actions responding to human violence in kind. In this panel, we address a full array of genres portraying vegetal vengeance including eco-horror comics, cli fi novels, eco-poetry, and horror film. Collaboration continues in each genre, but often with less helpful outcomes for the human actants. Some stories raise the issue of whether the use of anthropomorphized forms of vegetal agency most appropriately features the plant-human relationships that industrial activity is currently damaging. And yet, we find that such wildly creative tales only begin to reveal the reality of plant power for our lives and that restricting the imaginative entanglements often lessens our appreciation of the vegetal. Through the study of radical vegetal vengeance, this panel works to expand our attention to the essential relationships with green lives upon which we all depend.
Solvejg Nitzke (Ruhr-University), “‘The Trees Are Out to Get Us’: Arboreal Vengeance in Eco-Horror Comics”
Abstract: The history of human-tree relationships is as much a history of care as it is one of violence, though the latter might actually dominate the grand scheme of things (see for example Jared Farmer: Elderflora (2022) and John Miller’s The Heart of the Wood. Why Trees Matter, 2022). Given the increasingly popular view of trees as agential beings capable of forming interspecies relationships, of communicating and collaborating (see Nitzke 2025), Dawn Keetley’s fifth thesis on plant horror comes to mind: If plants keep track of human violence, one has to assume that “plants will get their revenge” (2016). Consequently, a growing number of texts revive the idea of trees striking back, yet, as I will show in this talk, the dialogue with changing ideas of what plants in general, and trees in particular, are capable of, also transform the scope of arboreal vengeance narratives. The paper will give a short overview about forms of arboreal vengeance – ghost trees, arboreal judges and executioners (recently revived e.g. in novels by Elif Shafak, Andrew Michael Hurley and Percival Everett) – in order to focus on a new scale of tree revenge prevalent in comic books. Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester’s series Family Tree (2020-2021), Waren Ellis and Jason Howard’s The Trees (2015-2020) and Zep’s The End (2020) combine scientific novels and eco-horror narratives to model the ideas of arboreal vengeance on a global scale, i.e. they narrate how trees conspire to get rid of humans once and for all. Exploring these comics as dialogues between environmentalist narratives, scientific theses and generic forms of horror, this paper follows the cultural poetics of arboreal vengeance and the dark pleasure of imagining the end of the human species at the branches of trees.
Bio: Solvejg Nitzke is interim professor of comparative literature at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She researches the production of knowledge under precarious circumstances in science fiction, literary and philosophical texts. She has worked on a wide array of topics ranging from the Tunguska-Event (a paradigmatically unexplained explosion in Siberia, 1908) to global warming, village ecologies and the literary and cultural lives of trees. She is the author of Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care (Palgrave 2025).
Heather I. Sullivan (Trinity University), “Vegetal Vengeance in Cli-Fi: A Spectacle of Co-Species Collaborative Destruction”
Abstract: With this study of “Vegetal Vengeance” in two contemporary climate-change novels, plants react aggressively with varying forms of “agency” in response to anthropogenic crises. Most significantly, plant agency involves forms of collaborative revenge with other species; in other words, vegetal vengeance is no individualized action of an individual subject. Instead, they join forces with fungi, birds and other pollinators, animals including occasionally humans, and other plants. Plant action is collaborative and embodies distributed agency, much like Anna Tsing and her co-editors describe broadly in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and Donna Haraway discusses in Staying with the Trouble. For example, Bernhard Kegel’s 2024 novel, Gras, presents genetically modified grass slowly taking over Berlin, empowered both by genetic modification undertaken by eco-terrorists but also the plants’ fungal co-species to become an apocalyptically powerful force that drives the humans out of the area. In Jasmin Schreiber’s 2024 futuristic, ecofeminist novel, Endling, climate change and the return of fascism drives women into the deep forests of Italy and Sweden where ancient, prehistoric vegetation exists in secret areas where only females survive due to what might be a magical vegetal influence interacting with all the species in the area. Plant dominance, a power which rules our planet’s ecosystems with its production of oxygen, transformation of water, nitrogen, and carbon cycles, and its creation of food and matter to support most large-bodied beings, becomes “vegetal vengeance” in both these contemporary novels of climate and social crises where plants must take on new forms and new kinds of collaborations in the wake of human ecological destruction. We all live in co-species collaborations, of course, with our gut biome or fungal-root-pollinator interactions; plants cooperate in these two novels to undermine the non-cooperative human cultures with livid green vengeance.
Bio: Heather I. Sullivan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Trinity University, USA. She has published widely on ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, Goethe, German Romanticism, petro-texts, the “dark green,” fairy tales, and critical plant studies, and is currently working on a manuscript “The Dark Green: Plants, People, Power.” Sullivan is past President of the North American Goethe Society, Associate Editor of the European Ecocriticism Journal Ecozon@, and Co-editor of the De Gruyter series, “Ecocriticism Unbound.”
Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta), “Plant Revenge, Resistance and Revenants in Contemporary Environmental Poetry”
Abstract: Attributing intentions such as revenge, anger, greed, or other strong emotions to plants is not without its problems. The accusation of an undue anthropomorphizing quickly follows. However, in recent environmental literature, and especially in environmental poetry, anthropomorphizing is justified as a strategic means not only of appropriating the non-human world, but also of granting it a form of agency. This agency can consist, for example, of plants quickly overgrowing human dwellings and infrastructures, their seed pods being thrown into the air ‘with fury’, or the fact that they cannot be eradicated even with great effort. Indeed, many new studies in botany, philosophy, and critical plant work indicate that plants have their own kind of agency and intelligence that may be slower than human timeframes but includes communication, supportive reactions to relatives, aggression towards other species, and resistance to (human) interventions. Textually, we find many examples in the current environmental poetry collections, including Marion Poschmann’s Geistersehen [Ghost-Seeing] (2010), Jan Wagner’s award-winning Regentonnenvariationen [Rain-barrel Variations] (2014), Oswald Egger’s Val Di Non (2017), Daniela Danz’s Wildniß [Wildernis] (2020). In selected poems from these and probably further poetry collections, the talk wants to examine the significance of the representation of affective forms of articulation, the extent to which the plant world is adequately represented, and whether these are suitable for rethinking the deeply disturbed relationship between humans and nature in new and creative ways.
Bio: Gabriele Duerbeck is a Professor for Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Vechta. She has widely published in the fields of ecocriticism, narratives of the Anthropocene, German-language nature writing, postcolonial studies, dystopian world literature, travel literature on the South Pacific, and the history of anthropology and aesthetics. She is conducting the research project ”Natural-cultural memory in the Anthropocene. Archives, Media and Literatures of Earth History” (2024-2026, funded by the German Research Foundation). Gabriele is editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift.
Catherin Persing (Ruhr University) , “Out of Control: Unruly Plants and the Ambivalence of More-Than-Human Care in Little Joe and Little Otik”
Abstract: Monstrous plants that strike back recur in ecological imaginations. This talk examines two audiovisual examples of such ‘vegetal vengeance’: Little Joe (Hausner, 2019) and Little Otik (Otesánek, Švankmajer and Švankmajerová, 2000). In both films, the monstrous plants do not appear as ‘wild’ creatures; instead, they emerge from the entanglement of more-than-human entities with human-made infrastructures: the laboratory and the garden. Following Tsing et al. (2021), they can be considered ‘feral entities’ resulting from the unintended, uncontrollable and unforeseeable consequences of human transformation processes.
In Little Joe, this dynamic manifests in a genetically engineered plant designed to make people happy, but which instead manipulates human cognition to establish an affective regime of control. Little Otik, by contrast, translates the fairytale motif of the artificial child into an allegory of reproductive desire and socio-ecological catastrophe through the figure of an all-devouring vegetal offspring whose care literally consumes his parents. In both films, plants manipulate humans into devoting themselves entirely to vegetal well-being, revealing a world in which hierarchies have changed, and humans seem to exist merely as resources for plant life. This kind of ‘vegetal vengeance’ not merely functions as a narrative threat but unsettles anthropocentric notions of care and generativity. By binding humans in relations of excessive and ambivalent care, the monstrous plants highlight tensions of responsibility, dependency, and domination that characterize more-than-human entanglements. Drawing on theorists such as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), Barnett (2023), or Silberzahn (2024), the talk examines how the vengeful plants in Little Joe and Little Otik emphasize the conflictual, unruly dimensions of care and reveal the necessity of a rearticulation, particularly in the face of neoliberal exploitation logics affecting human and more-than-human worlds.
Bio: Catherin Persing is a research associate at the DFG Research Training Group “Documentary Practices. Excess and Privation” at Ruhr University Bochum. She works at the intersection of Performance Studies and the Environmental Humanities, focusing on ecocriticism, decolonial theory, and cultural plant studies. Her doctoral project “Performing Plants: From the Anthropocene to Scenes of the More-than-Human” explores artistic practices that foreground plant perspectives and aesthetics as a way of addressing ecological crises, histories of violence, and cross-species relationality.