Senior Seminar
Plant Poetics and Garden Plots
This senior seminar in Comparative Literature will be divided into two parts: in the first we will read a number of literary and philosophical texts that explore what differentiates plants from other living beings and what is specific to their ways of being in the world: their languages and morphologies, their modes of communication, community, temporality, mobility, and reproduction. We will seek to determine the forms of agency specific to plants. In the second part we will turn our attention to gardens as spaces defined by heightened plant-human interactions.
If one motif in the literature we will read in Part 1 is the disregard of plants for man-made borders and fixed edges, gardens, by contrast, are often defined by a strong differentiation between “inside” and “outside” (between the plants cultivated within their borders and the wilder vegetation without), even as they often also occupy the borderlands and edge spaces between habitation and vacancy, development and abandonment. We will explore the continuities between gardens and other sites of enclosure and concentration: classrooms, prisons, plantations, colonies. Recent anticolonial scholarship such as Sonya Posmentier’s Cultivation and Catastrophe has examined cultivation not as the antithesis to catastrophe, but as an instrument of genocide and a prelude to contemporary ecocide. Open-aired museums? Living laboratories?--how do gardens help us rethink the relation between “nature” and “culture”? the “wild” and “domestic”? the indigenous and non-native? What distinguishes “forcing” from “tending”? Or feeding from nurturing?
Meeting when possible at appropriate social distance in the Student-run Organic Garden (SOGA) on Oxford Street, we will draw on what we learn in Part 1 to think together about how to define and shape this multigenerational collaborative space of learning in partnership with its nonhuman participants. As we struggle to learn during and in relation to the twin ongoing catastrophes of climate change and Covid, you will also be invited to visit and participate in other nearby reparative projects--the Gill Tract (student-run urban farm) in Albany, Urban Tilth in Richmond, Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project in Berkeley, the Berkeley Youth Alternative Production Garden in Berkeley, and the UC Botanical Garden--or similar experiments in community gardening near you wherever you may be. Other outdoor projects may include pulling ivy from Strawberry Creek on campus and planting a pollinator garden on the edges of Dwinelle Hall.
Accommodation will be made if for any reason you are unable to meet the class in person. Lecture notes will be available on a google document ahead of each session. SOGA garden classes will not be recorded but they should be joinable via Zoom in real time. When necessary, a remote student will be designated the host of a Zoom meeting which I and others will be able to join from the garden by our respective telephones. (There is no connectivity in the garden but the possibility of joining Zoom by phone obviates the need for wifi). Rather than experiencing the fact that we may not all be sharing the same physical space as a hindrance, we will emphasize the work of relay--summary, paraphrase, repetition, elaboration--as essential to the process of collaborative learning. The presence of virtual auditors will be an occasion for students to practice their skills at verbalizing what they see, hear and smell in the garden. Virtual auditors will be asked to reciprocate by describing where they find themselves.
readings will be drawn from the following
M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources
Gilles Clément, “The Vagabondage of Plants”
Erasmus Darwin, “The Loves of the Plants”
Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
J.W. Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants
Francis Hallé, In Praise of Plants
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature
Wendy Johnson, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants
J.J. Rousseau, Botanical Dictionary
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Colonial World
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Lesley Stern, “Garden or Grave?: The Canyonic Region of the Tijuana-San Diego Region”
Henry David Thoreau, “The Succession of Trees”
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees