Session: 3e
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 1.19
Chair: Imelda Martín Junquera
Virginia Luzón-Aguado (University of Zaragoza), “‘Little Joe Doesn’t Think at All!’: Representing Plant Agency in Little Joe (2019)”
Abstract: When fantasies of Nature taking revenge for the damage that humans inflict are reflected in popular culture, animals usually take the centre stage. Cinematic examples of such confrontations spanning a number of genres abound, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws and James Cameron’s Avatar. It is a fact that plants are granted a secondary position in the fictional struggle against human domination. There are two likely reasons for this. Wandersee and Schussler (1999) have observed that humans suffer from “plant blindness,” i.e. we are generally unable to appreciate plants in the same way as we appreciate animals, despite the fact that plants are key for our survival. Also, because of their limited mobility, humans find it difficult to identify plants as a threat to our integrity. As they cannot move in the same way as animals can, plants are not able to chase humans. However, this does not mean that plants do not pose dangers. In fact, some plants are capable of intoxicating, even killing, humans and other animals when their berries are eaten or their flowers are touched. In this paper, I propose to elaborate on the ideas above by making reference to the film Little Joe (2019), a recent example of the “plant horror” subgenre. Throughout my analysis I will be stressing the agentic power of plants, which are not the passive living entities that many humans believe them to be. In both real life and in fiction, they display volition and the capacity to react to their environment. Little Joe makes direct reference to such abilities by presenting us with a group of flowers bred in a biotechnical laboratory that revolt against human exploitation.
Bio: Film scholar Virginia Luzón-Aguado works at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has published work on different forms of ecomedia in different anthologies and journals, including ISLE. Her most recent publications include the book chapters “Turning over a New Leaf: Exploring Human-Tree Relationships in The Lorax and Avatar” (Bloomsbury, 2022), “Take Back the Walk: Trekking and Female Empowerment in Wild and Tracks” (Routledge, 2025) and “Breaking the Species Divide. Entangled Empathy and Environmental Hope in The Olive Tree and My Octopus Teacher” (Vernon Press, forthcoming).
Olena Tiaglova (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena), “Narrating with Plants: Econarratology and Non-Human Vegetal Ontologies in Contemporary Russian Literature”
Abstract: In 2015, Erin James introduced the term “econarratology”, unifying narratology and ecocriticism by proposing that narrative structure itself can convey ecological meaning, even in texts that lack direct environmental representation.
Building on James’s framework, scholars have increasingly turned to non-human narratology, exploring how narratives reshape human perceptions of animals, plants, and other forms of non-human life. David Herman (2018), for instance, draws on post-Darwinian theory to examine the complex interrelations between humans and animals. According to Herman (2018), the narrative has the power to reframe the cultural models or ontologies that undergird hierarchical understanding of human’s place in the larger biotic communities of which they are members.
This paper extends the research on non-human narratology and representation of plants in Russian literature. Environmental humanities scholars have developed “phytocriticism”, a method of reading literature “through a botanical optic” (Ryan 2020). Philosopher Michael Marder (2013, 2014, 2016) develops a new ontology of plants, reframing the ethical relationship between humans and plants. Similarly, Joela Jacobs (2022) introduces “phytopoetics” – a counterpart to zoopoetics – emphasizing vegetal life as a force entangled with themes of gender, violence, and death.
Drawing on Driscoll and Hoffmann (2018), Jacobs argues that plants in narrative “are neither just metaphor, nor just plant.” Stobbe, Kramer, and Wanning (2022) engage with Roland Borgards’ argument that plants can, in certain respects, be considered alongside animals.
My study applies these concepts to contemporary Russian literature, focusing on Andrei Rubanov’s dystopian dilogy Chlorophyllia (2009), in which invasive grass overtakes Moscow and humans gradually merge with vegetal life. Rubanov’s narrative reimagines human-plant relations, offering a powerful vision of post-anthropocentric ecological entanglement. Rubanov’s narrative dramatizes vegetal power in ecological and metaphysical terms. The author challenges the notion of passive plant life, suggesting instead that humans are subject to vegetal cycles. His dystopia is an eco-philosophical meditation: not a warning against plants, but a radical reimagining of life with and as plants.
Bio: Olena Tiaglova is a Ph.D. candidate in Slavonic Literature at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, specializing in Russian dystopian literature, narratology, and environmental humanities. She is a DAAD and former DBU fellow, with research experience at the University of British Columbia. In 2025, she serves as Social Media Representative for EASLCE. Her recent publication, “Cultural Perception of Environmental Problems in Russian Literature” (2025), examines how ecological crisis shape narrative structures in contemporary Russian environmental discourse.
Jennifer S. Henke, “Ferocious Fungi, Monstrous Mushrooms? On Fungal Resistance in Contemporary Folk Horror Film”
Abstract: In this talk, I use the mycological imaginary to explore how fungi function as forms of nonhuman resistance in a genre that has only recently been experiencing a revival, but which is particularly well-suited for questions of ecology: folk horror. Taking my cue from works by Scovell (2017), Tsing (2017), Sheldrake (2021), Crane (2021), Kreike (2021), Schmitt (2023), Bacon (2023), Ingham (2023), Sideris (2023) and others, I argue that folk horror films such as those produced by Ben Wheatley, and which often feature active and hostile landscapes, not only destabilize binaries between the human and nonhuman but can also be read against the backdrop of nature uprising. In A Field in England (2013) and In the Earth (2021), for example, fungi also play a crucial and ambivalent role: besides the fact that fungi themselves are neither plants nor animals, they have the potential to both enlighten the films’ human characters and to harm them. In the course of my discussion, I will focus on the psychoactive qualities of certain fungi, the question of how they can help us understand our interconnectedness with nature, and how contemporary folk horror films negotiate this potential. What happens when human characters are offered the possibility to communicate with nature through fungi but do not listen? How do fungal networks resist human and especially scientific mastery and rewrite it in terms of survival in a world of ecological crises? What role does the aspect of horror play in the representation of fungal agency? How do other horror films such as Colm McCarthy’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) or Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia (2021) tie in with folk horror and the fungal imaginary? My preliminary conclusion is that fungi resist not only conceptually but also provoke ecological awareness. This holds particularly true for psychedelic mushrooms, which can be both monstrous and enlightening – depending on whether humans choose to listen or not. Ultimately, the films under discussion urge their audiences to confront fungal alterity not only as a monstrous uprising but also as an invitation to reimagine alliances across species boundaries.
Bio: PD Dr. phil. habil. Jennifer S. Henke received her PhD for a thesis on gender and space in cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (WVT, 2014) from the University of Bremen, and recently published her second book on gender and medicine in eighteenth-century cultural artefacts with a special focus on material cultures (Routledge, 2025). She obtained her Venia Legendi in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Bonn and currently works as an interim professor of English Literature at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg.
Luiza Teixeira-Costa (Meertens Institute), “Flipping the Parasite Spectrum: Plant Humanities Meet Eco-Physiology”
Abstract: In recent decades, the topic of parasitism among plants has become a subject of interest in biological and human sciences. This has led to an increasing body of research reporting on the cultural value and the ecological benefits brought about by certain parasitic plants, mainly those like mistletoes and eyebrights, which are now understood as being “not so bad after all.” Nevertheless, at the other end of a horizontal spectrum, plants like dodder and broomrape, which lack the photosynthetic capacity to fulfil their nutritional needs, are portrayed as dangerous weeds that threaten food security. I argue that this point of view obfuscates the role played by land use changes and intensive monoculture in disrupting ecosystem processes that balance out the negative effects associated with parasite populations. To address this, I combine historical and literary accounts of parasitic plants with data from ecology and physiology research to reimagine the terms “parasite” and “host” as dynamic identities that fluctuate in a vertical spectrum spanning the whole life cycle of these plants and their parasitic relationship. Considering multispecies entanglements, I extend these fluctuating identities beyond the two interfacing plants to also include the fungi, humans, and non-human animals that participate in the eco-cultural networks centred around parasitic flowering plants.
Bio: Luiza Teixeira-Costa has an academic background in Plant Biology/Botany, with a focus on morphology, ecology, and physiology. She currently works as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Meertens Institute (Netherlands) and is an Honorary Research Associate at Meise Botanic Garden (Belgium). Her research focuses on the multiple interactions among plants and between plants and people, with particular interest on parasitic plants, botanical art, natural history collections, and history of urban landscaping.