Plant Poetics

Joela Jacobs is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and maintains the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network. She works in plant and animal studies, environmental humanities, Jewish studies, the history of sexuality and of science.Isabel Kranz is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is currently completing a monograph about plants as figures of knowledge from 1700 to 2000 and co-editing a handbook on cultural theory and the vegetal.Solvejg Nitzke is Interim Professor for Comparative Literature at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her publications range from catastrophes and climate to village fiction. Her book Making Kin with Trees: A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care will appear in 2025.

• FiguresNotes on ContributorsIntroductionJoela Jacobs, Isabel Kranz, and Solvejg Nitzkepart 1: Vegetal Forms1 “Imagine a Green Plant Shooting Up from Its Root”: Goethe’s Vegetal PoeticsMichael Bies2 Towards a Literary Botanical Approach: Katrina Kalda’s The Country of Trees without ShadowsRachel Bouvet, Stephanie Posthumus, and Noémie Dubé3 Tree Trunks in Motion: “Cinematic Style” and Plant Poetics in Alfred Döblin’s “Murder of a Buttercup” and Mountains Oceans GiantsOliver Völkerpart 2: Arboreal Poetics4 The Deep Time of Life: Narrative Speed as Expression of Arboreal Time Scales in Richard Powers’s The OverstoryEva Axer5 From Tree Talk to Forest Thinking: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Annie Proulx’s BarkskinsSusan McHugh6 Writing Trees and Chasing Spirits: Marion Poschmann’s and Esther Kinsky’s Third Nature PoeticsHelga G. Braunbeckpart 3: Plant Potentials7 When Plants Attack: Ancient Sallies in the War on WeedsRebecca Armstrong8 The Poetics of Plants: Performing Speech, Performing Self, Performing GreenAndrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika9 Vegetal Art and Activism in Frans Krajcberg’s SculpturesPatrícia VieiraIndex