What does it mean to be intelligent? To communicate? To have agency in the world? This course centers on Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters (2024), a groundbreaking exploration of plant intelligence that challenges fundamental assumptions about consciousness, communication, and what constitutes a "voice" worth hearing. Through intensive discussions separated by extended periods of reflection, we will live with Schlanger's revelations about how plants sense, decide, remember, and communicate—often in ways that exceed human imagination. As we encounter beings that challenge the boundaries between self and other, active and passive, individual and collective, questions emerge: How do we write about forms of life that resist our categories? What happens when the subjects of our study refuse to be objects? If plants can "author" their own chemical communications, what does this mean for human claims to literary authority? How might different cultural traditions—from Islamic concepts of layered consciousness to Arabic literary frameworks that recognize hidden meanings—offer ways of understanding intelligence that Western science is only beginning to glimpse? When a text argues that consciousness exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary, how do we read differently? What would literary criticism look like if it took seriously the possibility that meaning-making happens beyond human language? How do contemporary writers from regions often studied as "objects" navigate questions of agency, voice, and representation that plants now pose to science itself? Students from all disciplines and backgrounds will find their own frameworks—literary, cultural, philosophical, scientific—both illuminated and complicated by this text. No prior knowledge of botany required; curiosity about the limits of human language and the possibilities of non-human meaning-making essential as well as an openness for explorative formats of learning - if you are expecting sessions every week and page by page discussions of literature, this will likely not satisfy you. close