Dr. Chelsea Largent
Lecturer, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Keynote Address: “Going Vegetal: Rooted Self-Exile”
“dull weight grips her limbs
As slender bark enfolds her supple torso.
Her hair sprouts up as leaves, her arms as branches.
A stiff root clasps her foot, just now so swift.
The treetop takes her mouth. Just her gleam remains.”
– “Apollo Attempts to Rape Daphne” l.588-594
Ovid, Metamorphoses trans. Stephanie McCarter
According to Ovid, the metamorphosis of the nymph Daphne left her almost entirely transformed into a laurel tree: at the end of the myth, bark and leaves encase her body and “just her gleam remains.” This talk takes up feminine transformations reminiscent of Daphne’s in contemporary fiction by Han Kang, Marie N’Diaye, Rachel Yoder, and others. But more than the transformations themselves, this talk is about the gleam that remains. In that gleam, we can find a relation of copious desire, violence, and transformation that results in what Dr. Largent calls a generative form of self exile.
In her talk, Dr. Largent theorizes how going vegetal or bestial might be understood as a feminine reclamation. Is the gleam remaining the only way to hold a self? What can we find in the agentic act of rooting away from humanity? Departing from Jack Halberstam’s articulation of the wild and Mel Y. Chen’s concept of the queer inhuman, she aligns her approach with French Decadent valences of defiant femininity. Ultimately, she argues that these representations refigure and queer the wild.