Panel 2: Literature and Plants

Stefano Mancuso and Evando Nascimento

Host: Prisca Agustoni is a poet, translator and Professor of Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora

Stefano Mancuso, author of books such as Plant Revolution and The Plant of the World, is one of the most important botanists working for what is called the “vegetable turning point”: a moment when plants ceased being just decorative elements or sources of food, for example, and started being studied for their own intelligence and sensibility. From this perspective, he does research on what he calls “plant neurobiology”. A pioneer in studying the relationship between the literary text and the vegetal universe in his book O pensamento vegetal: a literatura e as plantas [Vegetal Thinking: Literature and Plants], essayist and writer Evando Nascimento dialogues with Mancuso and other scientists, as well as philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Emanuele Coccia. He also studies modern writers such as Fernando Pessoa and Clarice Lispector, and contemporary ones, like Leonardo Fróes and Ana Martins Marques. Nascimento carefully analyzes why criticism and literary theory have paid so little attention to plants. He proposes what he calls vegetal thought, with the purpose of questioning the humanist and anthropocentric tradition.