The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World

by Patrícia Vieira (Editor), Monica Gagliano (Editor), John Ryan (Editor)

The Green Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, intelligence.

The leading metaphor of the book—“the green thread”, echoing poet Dylan Thomas’ phrase “the green fuse”—carries multiple meanings. On a more apparent level, “the green thread” is what weaves together the diverse approaches of this an interest in the vegetal that goes beyond single disciplines and specialist discourses, and one that not only encourages but necessitates interdisciplinary and even interspecies dialogue. On another level, “the green thread” links creative and historical productions to the materiality of the vegetal—a reality reflecting our symbiosis with oxygen-producing beings. In short, The Green Thread refers to the conversations about plants that transcend strict disciplinary boundaries as well as to the possibility of dialogue with plants.

Genres: Nature, Philosophy

326 pages, Hardcover

First published December 17, 2015

About the author

Patrícia Vieira is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese, Comparative Literature, and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University and Associate Research Professor at the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra. Her fields of expertise are Comparative Literature, Literature and Philosophy, Literary Theory, Utopian Studies and Environmental Studies.

Reviews

[Dan Carey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a book by philosophers for philosophers. Ultimately, the prose was too dense to keep me interested.