Session: 2g
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 1.17
Chair: Mace Bielderman
Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu (Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University), “‘Mother Nature is a psychopath’: Super-Natures and Vegetal Monstrosity in Ali Shaw’s The Trees”
Abstract: Instead of evoking a sense of pastoral beauty of nature, Ali Shaw reverses the relationship between the human and the nonhuman realms, the ‘Anthropos’ and dendrological world through ‘treepocalypse’ in his ecothriller, The Trees (2016). The protagonist, Adrien Thomas, a self-loathing anti-hero, wakes to find out that the trees coming from ancient and deep history have destructively reclaimed the anthropocentric world. In this post-apocalyptic, environmental dystopian scenario, the Anthropocene and the Anthropos are haunted first by the ‘monstrous’ trees which have erupted through the buildings, cars, and roads, obliterating towns, destroying the human-made world, and killing humans, and second, by the idea that the Anthropos is not at all masters of the earth but the dendrological realm is. In this context, drawing on posthumanism and vegetal ecocriticism, this study argues that Shaw construes a post-anthropocentric point of contact with the ecological world through articulating trees as agentic and avenging forces, as super-natures that transgress into the world of humans. What The Trees suggests in this sense is that the mistake is to believe that nature is inert and predictable, and that the environment is vibrant, alive, feral, darker, and sublime. As this presentation shows, the figure of monstrous trees in the novel is positioned both as posthuman entity and as positive agent for the human’s re-identification with the environment. At the end of the novel, after embarking on an eco-quest with Hannah, a tree-hugger gardener, her son Seb, and Hiroko, a survivalist, for a search for Hannah’s woodman brother and his wife Michelle in Ireland, Adrien becomes part of a supernatural tree-entity and uncannily recognizes the tree, Other, as an inseparable property of himself. The presentation concludes by looking at the ecocritical implication of whether self-annihilation becomes a way out for humans from the global ecological crises.
Bio: Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu is Associate Professor of English literature at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, specializing in the environmental humanities, posthumanities, and gender studies. He obtained his PhD in English Literature from Hacettepe University, Turkey in 2018. He has written on such topics as ecogender, posthuman bodies, animals, climate change, postnatural environments, ecofeminism. Recently, he has contributed to the edited volumes, Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes, Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media, and The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature.
Moira J. Deicke (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), “Weird Ecologies. Queering Nature and the (Non) Human in Speculative Fiction”
Abstract: In the summer term of 2025, I led a tutorial (“Weird Ecologies. Queering Nature and the (Non) Human in Speculative Fiction”) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin that introduced students from various disciplines and degree levels to ecocritical theory and speculative fiction. Among the texts we read were Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) and Henry Hoke’s Open Throat (2023), two works nearly thirty years apart that both challenge the binary between human and nonhuman narrative by presenting readers with complex and unsettling protagonists. In Wicked, the Wicked Witch – known from Baum’s 1900 novel and its Technicolor film adaptation – is given a name, Elphaba, and a political identity as she fights for equal rights for Animals. Through shifting narrative perspectives and devices, her gender and even species remain ambiguous, producing a layered story of kinship and diversity. Hoke’s novel, by contrast, seems at first more straightforward: its protagonist is a nonbinary cougar whose reflections on shrinking habitat unfold in close proximity to human life. Yet the homodiegetic narration simultaneously recalls a human voice while experimenting with language and epistemologies that blur species boundaries. Paired with theoretical texts by Donna Haraway on kinship and Aph and Syl Ko on speciesism, these novels opened discussions of climate change, animal rights, identity, and interspecies relations. The tutorial culminated in a collaboratively produced creative zine, which will be published, documenting the students’ critical and artistic responses.
Bio: Moira (preferred name) Johanna Deicke is an MA student in English Literatures at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she also obtained a BA in German Literature and English. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Anne Enderwitz and Prof. Dr. André Otto, she is currently finalising her thesis on Romantic Medieval Ecologies within J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation myth The Silmarillion.
Alperen Yedekçi (University of Ankara), “The Uncanny Green and Nonhuman Resistance: Ecohorror and Posthuman Ecology in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing”
Abstract: This paper argues that Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (1984–1987) reframes horror not as an encounter with the unnatural, but as an exposure to the irreducible vitality of the natural. Swamp Thing emerges not as a superhero but as a vegetal assemblage, a being whose hybrid body makes visible the entanglements of plant, stone, dust, soil, fungi, and memory. The graphic novel’s swamps and ruins are not settings but actants: landscapes of rot, contagion, and renewal that participate in what the conference calls “Nature biting back.” Horror here functions less as spectacle than as method. It unsettles anthropocentric stability by revealing the permeability of bodies and the unruliness of ecological systems. Unlike apocalyptic fantasies of ecological revenge, Swamp Thing stages a more complex drama where monstrosity becomes a mode of survival and intimacy. One of the most important characters in the series, Abigail Arcane’s transgressive relationship with Swamp Thing foregrounds a multispecies ethics of care, one that unsettles taboos yet insists on coexistence. In this way, Moore’s narrative resists the binary of nature as enemy or victim and instead imagines the swamp as a threshold zone where decay and creation, horror and desire, collapse into one another. Ultimately, this paper proposes that Swamp Thing offers an ecohorror poetics that is simultaneously terrifying and generative. By positioning “monstrous” flora as a symbol of resistance, the graphic novel demonstrates how graphic narratives can materialize theoretical discourses of posthuman ecology. The swamp does not simply host the story but it becomes “the storied matter”, a protagonist whose agency demands that we rethink justice, alliance, and survival beyond the human.
Bio: Alperen Yedekçi is an English Language and Literature MA student at Social Sciences University of Ankara, and he is a part-time English instructor at OSTIM Technical University. His academic interests include fantasy and science fiction literature, comic book and graphic novel studies, manga and anime studies, theatre and ecocritical studies. In addition to his academic pursuits, he also contributes to the performing arts as a playwright and actor.