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Yamanaka-Leclerc, Leo

University of British Columbia

This thesis examines the pathological plants and vegetal deaths of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014) and its subsequent film adaptation of the same name, directed by Alex Garland (2018). Both the novel and the film explore (self)-destruction and death through encounters between the human and the vegetal, leading to a disintegration of ontological boundaries between the categories of “human” and “plant.” I term this disintegration eco-death – dying by becoming-plant. I contend that the novel and film portray eco-death by conceptualizing plants as fundamentally deathly entities, hovering precariously between life and death. I trace the journeys of the major characters of the novel and film as each of them transform into plant life and death. These transformations are both physical and epistemological, radically altering the bodies as well as the minds of the characters. Furthermore, the novel and film connect vegetal life to sickness, pathology, and – more so in the film – cancer. The novel metaphorizes the vegetal transformation of its protagonist as a spore-induced sickness, while the film further envisions plant life as specifically metastatic. My introductory chapter grounds my thesis through an engagement with the study of Weird and New Weird fiction and cinematic plant horror, as well as recent scholarship in critical plant studies. My second chapter, focusing on the novel, examines the interrelated transformative pathways of “becoming-vegetative,” “becoming-vegetal,” and “becoming-plant.” My third chapter, focusing on the film, studies how its evocative visuals locate an uncanny sublime in monstrous plant life. Both versions of Annihilation are significant, contemporary ecocritical texts whose close study allows for deep engagement with the philosophy of vegetal life and humanity’s fraught relationship to plants and nature.

Text

2024-03-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87635

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/