Eighteenth- and 19th-Century Literature

Taking writing in the widest sense possible to include inscription, drawing, and the making and unmaking of traces, this class will focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings about and with plants, while also considering the metaphor of “plant writing” as something performed by plants themselves. We will consider the analogy between “close reading” and the slow work of observation and description necessary to such writing.

In what ways does botanical literature both contribute to and resist the geologically unprecedented homogenization of planetary biota that follows from European colonialism? How does the traffic in plants relate to the historical traumas of the forced displacement of people, chattel slavery and colonial dispossession? How do ideas of language, gender, sexuality, temporality, medicine and healing change in relation to plants during this period? Cognizant that the division of plants and animals into separate kingdoms, like the separation of humans from other living beings, is specific to the Western philosophical tradition, we will explore alternatives to these separations.

Sample reading list: the professor’s areas of specialization mean a bias toward French, German and English-language texts

Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Selections
J.W. Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants
John Clare, Selections
Selections from: Yosa Busan, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Mary Siisip Geniusz, Saidiya Hartman, Carl Linnaeus, Maria Sibylla Merian, John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, and others.

To borrow from Mike Hoerger, founding director of Louisiana’s HealthPsych PhD program, I would like to make this class a “COVID Sanctuary” and create a compassionate, inclusive, equitable environment that follows evidence-based COVID precautions and respects the needs of the most vulnerable among us. It is my sincere wish and hope that we will agree to wear masks as a class; anyone entering the class will be expected to be wearing a well-fitting, high quality mask (KN94, KN95, N95 or better) at all times.

The class will occasionally meet outdoors in places such as the University Botanical Garden.