Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
You are warmly invited to an academic lecture by Prof. Christiane Arndt, Associate Prof. in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University.
Lecture Title:
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Gardening in Recent Literature
Date: Thursday, March 13, 2025
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Department Library, Room 323, 3rd Floor, Odette Hall
About the Lecture:
In response to recent ecological and societal crises, literary texts might not initially appear as an obvious solution. Yet auto-fictional texts that explore material practices such as gardening are trending. By engaging with themes like racism, colonialism, and ecological activism, these works engage with gardening in a narrative framework that has the potential to probe the complex interplay of identity and societal narratives.
Central to the discussion are analyses of works by Camille Dungy, Jamaica Kincaid, and Lola Randl, which illustrate diverse interactions between gardening and writing. These texts explore issues of racism, colonialism and ecological activism, and thus exemplify how gardening provides a lens through which to explore the dynamic between material practices and narrativity.
The discussion is theoretically informed by insights from material culture theories, particularly those of Donna Haraway and Tim Ingold. Exploring how material practices are narrated within an anthropological framework underscores the transformative potential of integrating narrative with physical, shared, lived experience. Focusing on the literary implications of gardening, the talk investigates medial, rhetorical and narrative characteristics of the texts.
In sum, this talk offers perspectives on how daily practices influence literary and cultural narratives.
About the Speaker:
Christiane Arndt is an Associate Prof. in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University in Canada. She was a Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation in 2013 and 2018. Her current research projects focus on the literary and visual representation of disease around 1900, and on the materiality of gardening and other handicraft practices in recent German literature. Other areas of research are 19th-century Realism in German literature, cultural minimalism, photography and literature, and historic anti-vaccine images and narratives.
We look forward to welcoming you to this engaging academic talk!
