Plants have recently come to the fore in the humanities where the interest in the non-human fostered by ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthumanism has shifted to the vegetal. With increasing urgency, plants, their agency, and their cultural/natural impact are being studied by literary and cultural scholars. In order to radically rethink the status of the vegetal, this workshop investigates the place of plants in philosophy and literature, addressing both specific sites of the vegetal (such as the earth, the garden, or the middle) as well as the role of plants for our understanding of human-nature relations in the age of the so-called anthropocene. Particular emphasis will be placed upon questions of scale from an all-encompassing “planthroposcene” (proposed by anthropologist Natasha Myers) to minuscule parts of plants as a place for reflection in order to conceptualize the specific spatio-theoretical dimensions of the vegetal.

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