Like stories themselves, forests have little respect for geopolitical boundaries. And like forests, stories have always played a crucial role in human imaginations around the world. The wide distribution of forests across most of the planet's biospheres suggests that stories about forests, as well as the stories that forests tell, should be understood in relation to literary and theoretical encounters both with plants and with the planet. While discourse on climate change focuses on deforestation and reforestation in relation to the problem of dangerously increased carbon dioxide levels, trees and forests are treated in large part instrumentally rather than as agents in their own right. But literary treatments of trees and forests imagine different kinds of stories, in which not only humans, but trees and forests, can be characters in a narrative with their own agency. As Richard Powers writes in The Overstory, “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”

This seminar invites reflection on the forest/story nexus throughout literary and cultural history, particularly in relation to the growing understanding that plants, trees, and forests have their own stories to tell. Because of the wide distribution of forests across most of the planet's biospheres, we especially welcome proposals that consider these questions in non-Anglophone, transnational, or comparative settings.

Some topics that might be considered:

-what is the temporality of the forest, especially in contrast to human or social timeframes?

-who are the humans and nonhumans that inhabit forests? How and why?

-how do forests experience disturbance or crisis—whether climatic or otherwise?

-how does a cultural geography that begins with forests differ (if it does) from a socio-cultural one?

-what, from a literary or narrative point of view, is vital about forests, and what from an arboreal point of view, is vital about stories?

-what promises of futures or the lack thereof do forests make?

In addressing these and other related questions, papers might draw on any of a number of theoretical frameworks. Approaches drawing on the political economy of woodlands might be as insightful as those focused on eco-phenomenology, queer ecology, new materialisms, tropology, or literary history.

To propose a paper, please visit the ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/seminar/d2a8ab99-a421-4709-9786-4ab295b9ff88