Being and Becoming with Plants in Sue Burke’s Semiosis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17561/grove.v33.9755Keywords:
Plant being, Semiosis, more-than-human becoming, vegetal entanglements, plant agencyAbstract
This article takes up the question of more-than-human communication with the vegetal world, not from the perspective of how to communicate with the plant beings who inhabit the world with us by asking how an ethical being with plants can alter what it means to be human In order to do so, I will turn to the consider the ways in which Critical Plant Studies address these questions with a focus on plant communication before turning to consider the ways in which we can become with the vegetal, and the effects planty entanglements have on our understandings of what it means to be human and how Sue Burke’s 2018 science fiction novel Semiosis engages with these questions by bringing to the fore the agency of plants.
Downloads
References
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Indiana University Press, 2010.
Baker, Nancy E. “The Intelligence of Plants and the Problem of Language.” The Language of Plants Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John Charles Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Bignall, Simone, and Daryle Rigney. “Indigeneity, Posthumanism and Nomad Thought: Transforming Colonial Ecologies.” Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Eds. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall. Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019, pp. 159-83.
Burke, Sue. Semiosis. Harper Voyager, 2018.
Cariou, Warren. “Sweetgrass Stories: Listening for Animate Land.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 3, 2018, pp. 338-352. https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2018.10
Cockin, Katharine. “Becoming Plant and Posthumanism in Jeff Noon’s Pollen (1995).” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 57, no. 1, 2016, pp. 94-104. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2015.1019405
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Gagliano, Monica, John Charles Ryan and Patrícia Vieira, editors. The Language of Plants - Science, Philosophy, Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Haraway, Donna. “Awash in urine: DES and Premarin® in multispecies response-ability.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no, 1/2, 2012, pp. 301-316. https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2012.0005
---. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.
Lawrence, A. M. “Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 46, no. 2, 2022, pp. 629-651. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211062167
Marder, Michael. “To Hear Plants Speak.” The Language of Plants Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John Charles Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 103-25.
Oppermann, Serpil. “The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical Reflections.” Mosaic vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1353/mos.2018.0027
Valentina Romanzi. “Let the Plan(e)t Speak for Itself Agency, Empathy, and Subjectivity in Sue Burke’s Semiosis.” IPERSTORIA, vol. 19, 2022, pp. 346-360. https://dx.doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2022.I19.1092
Rosiek, J. L., and Snyder, J. “Narrative Inquiry and New Materialism: Stories as (Not Necessarily Benign) Agents.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 10, 2018, pp. 1151-1162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418784326
Ryan, John Charles. “Planting the eco-humanities? Climate change, poetic narratives, and botanical lives.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 8, no. 3, 2016, pp. 61–70.
https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v8n3.08
Schlanger, Zoë. The Light Eaters. How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. HarperCollins, 2024.
Searle, A., and Turnbull, J. “Resurgent natures? More-than-human perspectives on COVID-19.” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 10, no. 2, 2020, pp. 291–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620933859
Szczygielska, Marianna, and Cielemęcka, Olga. “Introduction to special section: Plantarium: Human–vegetal ecologies.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 5, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.32875
Vieira, P., Gagliano, M., & Ryan, J. C., editors. The Green Thread. Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Lexington Books, 2016.
Vine Deloria, Jr. “American Indian Metaphysics.” Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Eds. V. Deloria, Jr. and D. R. Wildcat, Fulcrum Publishing, 2001, pp. 1-6.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Robin Ruthven

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Also, authors will retain the rights on their work, even if they will be granting The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies a non-exclusive right of use to reproduce, edit, distribute, publicly communicate and show their work. Therefore, authors are free to engage in additional, independent contracts for non-exclusive distribution of the works published in this journal (such as uploading them to an institutional repository or publishing them in a book), as long as the fact that the manuscripts were first published in this journal is acknowledged.



















