This presentation has been postponed due to COVID-19 precautions. The new date is to be determined.
Please join us for this colloquium presentation (in German).
Vegetal Empowerment: Pflanzlich-menschliche Hybridisierungen in Literatur und Bildmedien des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts
European cultural history tells us about many border crossers and metamorphoses between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ realms—consider Ovid’s Metamorphoses, medieval flower girls, or vegetal symbols of Romanticism like the Blaue Blume. Even though there is a long tradition of such entanglements, the increasing emergences of vegetal-human hybrids at the beginning of the 20th century as well as at the beginning of the 21st are at least remarkable: The fictional combination of vegetal and human elements is reflected in early German science fiction, for example written by Kurd Laßwitz and Alfred Döblin. In this spirit, yet altering the hybrids’ semantics, artists like Frauke Berger and Olivia Vieweg utilize the hybridizations in their graphic literature after 2000.
Situated within the field of Cultural Plant Studies, Christina Becher’s work is linked to concepts like Ecocriticism and New Materialism that are part of the current cultural and literary paradigm. It addresses questions about forms and functions of the human-vegetal hybridizations, about their meaning in the particular texts, but also about their roles in docked discourses. Drawing from the botanical practice of vegetal hybridization, the project also utilizes linked categories like agency, gender, and material in order to situate the increased usage of hybridizations in natureculture contexts of overlapping crises.
Dissertation Supervisors:
Prof. Dr. Nicolas Pethes (University of Cologne)
Asst. Prof. Dr. Joela Jacobs (University of Arizona)
