# How Are We Still Reading? Textual Sessility and Futurity ## How Are We Still Reading? Textual Sessility and Futurity Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference 2025 Abigail Culpepper, *PhD Candidate, Department of French and Francophone Studies, Brown University* ![](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-02/pink-01.png?itok=MTGWp1a9) Since our actions have brought us today to a point of environmental polycrisis, many assume that it is our actions that will save us from the forecasted catastrophes ahead. With much to do, it is understandable then that many are suspicious, or even critical, of those whose professional work involves literally or figuratively stopping to smell the roses, the very idiom of *in*action. Within my field, that of literary study, such skepticism is directed at the apparent inaction and passivity of reading. If you think back to your last literature class, you might recall that the texts you studied were likely written long ago and, by nature, do not change, or at least do not *appear* to. We might even understand the immobility of texts as a sign of their irrelevance to our ever-changing world. Faced with urgent environmental threats, how is it then that we are *still* reading when there is so much to be done? This moral injunction is one that I think should be taken seriously. My current project articulates a response, explaining what unique insights literary criticism, specifically in the form of ecocriticism, has to offer to pressing ecological concerns. Those who study plants and fungi have shown that great insights can come from observing seemingly immobile objects. The fixed position of plants and fungi is the condition of possibility for unique modes of environmental engagement. From attracting pollinators with elaborate flowers to sharing resources across mycorrhizal networks of tree roots and fungi, these beings form networks of ecological relation that make possible still other forms of life. So the immobility of texts might be understood by taking plants and fungi as models of environmental engagement which form networks of relation thanks to, not despite, their immobility. More precisely, we should speak not of immobility but *sessility*, a term relatively uncommon outside of the biological sciences. Sessility traditionally describes species from the kingdom *Animalia,* like mussels or corals, incapable of locomotion. While an exception amongst animals, sessility is the norm for plants and for many varieties of fungi whose inability to locomote makes their survival dependent on their ecosystems. Extending the definition of sessility to include plants, fungi, and texts allows us to conceptualize their shared mode of relation. ![Book and grass](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/Book%20and%20Plant.jpg?itok=Jsc33tgo) Thinking of “sessility” as opposed to stillness or immobility also allows us to consider immobility as a scalar illusion; that is, plants and fungi only appear immobile to us humans. The movements of sessile organisms become perceptible if viewed at the microscopic level and over inhuman time scales, like the totality of a day in the case of heliotropic plants, the many weeks (and even months) it takes for mushrooms to erupt from a forest floor, or even centuries in the case of the growth of lichen. A multi-scalar attention to sessile organisms allows us to think through their networks of relation both on and beyond the human scale. Once we consider how multi-scalar attention reveals the dynamic lives of sessile organisms, we might consider analyzing texts in this way, reading across literal, figurative, temporal, intra- and inter-textual scales. In doing so, we then might see the network of ecological relations made possible by textual sessility. My work theorizes “reading sessility” to understand how texts relate to the world (and to other texts) as comparable to how sessile organisms relate to their environments. This approach draws on the methodological similarities between the scientific study of sessile organisms and literary criticism without eliding their differences. Thanks to the careful observations made by ecologists, botanists, mycologists, and others, plants and fungi have become models for rethinking how the human relates to the more-than-human world. As a literary scholar, I recognize this detailed and careful observation of a seemingly still object performed by scientists under a different name: “reading.” Observation and reading can each appear as inaction—the scientist or literary critic must still their attention to track the varying scalar relations of their objects. A literary critic might read a text just like a botanist might observe a leaf under a magnifying glass, for instance, looking at details and formal structures to develop a theory of their presence and effects.[1](#references) The scalar attention paid to texts often goes by “close reading.”[2](#references) The name for this practice implies attention to a smaller scale, hence the need to get close to a page, a sentence fragment, or even particular word. Such details are a relatively smaller part of a larger, more complete whole. The attention to detail that close reading invokes is not a literal attention to smallness but a relative one. To read closely is to stay with what I would characterize as a certain textual “stillness.” This still form of the text, a set pattern of characters, is not limited to the current time or place. The letter of the text can subsequently be repeated, moving from one place to another, without abandoning those contexts it was previously found in, forming instead a chain of past, present, and future iterations. Another way to look at this phenomenon is to say that close reading finds movement in stillness. This movement is not literal but associative; it is the echo of other signs that reverberate through a text and a reader. For example, when one writes the word “flower,” one invokes with it a whole host of meanings derived from different contexts, as if this flower has jumped from one place to another, from a garden into a text. Likewise, by putting the word flower in quotation marks, I explicitly reference that it has been plucked from some utterance beyond the present one, making the flower a citation now absent from its original bouquet.[3](#references) Reading for sessility allows us to take into consideration this variation in scales and contexts, following the relations between various living and textual flowers. This mode of analysis also allows us to consider what relations texts record or make possible, how they move across different scales, how they reproduce themselves, and what might be reproduced through them. This approach ultimately asks us to consider how our individual and collective survival may rely on texts; that texts will be what survives us. While the concept of sessility helps to reimagine the ways texts relate to their environments, there are modes of relation, namely the virtual and fictive, that are unique to texts. Plants and fungi have a specific materiality as animate organisms made up of a host of substances and only existing within specific environments. Texts, on the other hand, may have a certain linguistic composition but are not limited to a specific matter or place. Instead, texts have what Frédéric Neyrat calls “materiality without matter.”[4](#references) The text is the same no matter where you read it. Moreover, texts lacking in matter forge “virtual” relations whose materiality bridges the divide between the “fictive” world of literature and the “real” world of empirics.[5](#references) They thus offer a framework for thinking beyond the material substance of our world, beyond the world as it is already realized towards what it could be. ![Charles Baudelaire portrait](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/Charles%20Baudelaire.jpg?itok=xmyUQVUT) Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867Just as sessile organisms help us think beyond human perspectives, texts help us think about how nature circulates beyond the limits of matter. Literary criticism actualizes potential relations within and between texts and contexts, making a work of criticism another node within networks of ecological relation. Such literary critical work might elucidate intertextual references and makes connection between historical events and works of literature. It might also bring seemingly unrelated texts and contexts together, asking, for example, how a lecture meant to be delivered at Harvard in 1985 might resonate with a poem written in France over one hundred and fifty years ago. It is precisely this textual ecosystem that I would like to map in reading an essay on “Lightness” by the critic Italo Calvino alongside a poem by Charles Baudelaire, thereby taking on a multi-scalar perspective that looks across genres, as well as national, linguistic, and temporal boundaries.[6](#references) In “Lightness,” Calvino describes “an auspicious sign for the approach of a new millennium” located in “the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.”[7](#references) The lightness revealed by the poet/philosopher is that forms rise above the fatalism of their matter. This is how, as Calvino suggests, “we \[...\] will face the new millennium: without hoping to find there anything more that we’re able to bring with us,”[8](#references) the insights from our encounters with plants, fungi, texts, and each other. Calvino’s invocation of lightness resonates with a poem from Baudelaire’s *The Flowers of Evil* (1857). Considered an early work of poetic modernism and written against the backdrop of an urbanizing Paris, *The Flowers of Evil* is not usually remembered for its vegetal figures but for examining the woes and vices of city life. This tension, between the polluted grit of urban existence and the limpidity of nature, is staged in the third poem of the collection, entitled “Elevation.” > Above the ponds, above the valleys, > > The mountains, the woods, the clouds, the seas, > > Beyond the sun, beyond the heavens, > > Beyond the confines of the starry spheres, > > My spirit, with agility you make your way, > > And, like a skilled swimmer who glides in the deep, > > You gaily plough the profound immensity > > With unspeakable male sensuality. > > Fly far away from these morbid miasmas; > > Purify yourself in rarified air, > > And drink, like a pure and divine liqueur, > > The transparent fire that imbues limpid vistas. > > Beyond the troubles and the vast sorrows > > That lay their weight upon dim existence, > > Happy is he who on vigorous wing > > Soars to serene and luminous fields;[9](#references) > > He whose thoughts, like larks, > > Freely fly toward morning skies, > > —Who hovers above life, and knows without strife > > The language of flowers and of silent things! With its calls to “fly far away from these morbid miasmas,” it would be easy to read this poem as an example of literature’s tendency to withdraw from the world. The lyric voice, the speaker of the poem, commands its spirit to “fly far away” and “purify” itself in the opening stanza. This is just one way to interpret the poem, and we could even go further connecting Baudelaire’s poetry to accounts of pollution in nineteenth century Paris (see Quandt).[10](#references) But this sort of reading is too focused on the human scale—it makes sense of the poem by situating it within human history. It thus overlooks the connections available on other textual scales, much as an aboveground study of a tree misses its subterranean nexus. A multi-scalar reading of this text reveals that the lyric voice is not simply encouraging us to run away from our worldly problems but challenging us to take on different perspectives that would change how we see our own future. Notice the parallelism between the first two stanzas of “Elevation” and the last two, making the third stanza a pivot or reflection line. The final two stanzas transform the first- and second-person dialogue between lyric voice and spirit to a generic third person “he.” While in the first two stanzas the spirit escapes a terrestrial landscape, in the final stanzas it departs “\[b\]eyond the troubles and vast sorrows / that lay their weight upon dim existence” (l. 13-14). Yet a lightness can be found in all of this by one “who on a vigorous wing / Soars to serene and luminous fields.” Again, it is not the body which escapes, but the spirit, this time those “thoughts” which “like larks / Freely fly toward morning skies” (l. 17-18). ![Osage Orange Tree fruit](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/Osage%20orange.jpeg?itok=0iNAnj_U) It is he who takes on a bird’s eye view, who “hovers above life, and knows without strife / The language of flowers and of silent things!” that finds happiness. The poem’s concluding lines ground it in a startling way. After descriptions of celestial elevation and flight, lofty ideas that might escape the pollution of quotidian life, the final image conjured is not of a figure lost in the clouds but of a bird looking down on a field. Looking up from these final lines to review the poem as a whole, the third stanza appears not as a reflection line but as a horizon that divides the atmospheric descriptions of the first two stanzas from the terrestrial fields in the last. By stilling the flight of thought to live for a moment on the scale of those “flowers and other silent things,” we begin to read their ways of being as a type of language. This language, like all language, signifies through absence. To think of the “language of flowers” not only on human scales but also on the scale of plant life requires considering what flowers signify. Like the Osage Orange and Kentucky Coffeetree signify the existence of now extinct North American megafauna (like Mastodons and ground sloths), might flowers someday testify to extinct pollinators? In the future, might plants and fungi signify human absence? These virtual connections are what literary criticism actualizes. We might think of the language of flowers, in tandem with the rhetorical flowers penned in Paris many years ago, finding within them a redemptive lightness thanks to the words of critics like Calvino. As we look ahead towards an uncertain future, we might carry with us the literary critical insight that the ecological burdens weighing upon us also hold a redemptive lightness. Their matter does not define the limits of possibility but constitutes a starting point from which we might begin to read and think differently. ### Author Biography Abigail Culpepper is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. With an attention to textuality, their research focuses on problems of ecocritical reading and questions of literary scale. Informed by eco-deconstruction and new materialism, her dissertation entitled “Figures of Sessility: Reading Plants, Poems, and Other Still Things” argues for literary critical reading as a mode of environmental engagement in which flowering plants, lichen, and coral become models for a new textual ecology. ![Abigail Culpepper Headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-02/Culpepper%20Headshot%20Final.jpg?h=1fb69547&itok=XsDiZU9N) #### Footnotes 1. Helena Feder also notes the methodological overlap between close reading and scientific observation. See Helena Feder, “Introduction: The Unbearable Closeness of Reading,” *Close Reading the Anthropocene.* Ed. Helena Feder. (Routledge, 2021). [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 2. For further discussions of scale in criticism, see Julie Orlemanski’s “Scales of Reading,” Hannah Freed-Thall’s “Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading,” as well as Derek Woods’s pair of articles entitled “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” Julie Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading,” *Exemplaria* 26, no. 2-3 (2014): 215-233. Hannah Freed-Thall, “Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading.” *Modernism and Close Reading.* Ed. David James. (Oxford University Press 2020). Derek Woods. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” *minnesota review* 83 (2014): 133-142. Derek Woods. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene, Part Two.” *New Formations* 107/108 (2022): 155-170. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 3. Those familiar with Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Verse” will recognize this as a rephrasing of the famous line from the essay, “I say: a flower! And \[...\] there arises \[...\] what is absent from every bouquet.” Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Verse,” *Divagations.* Trans. Barabara Johnson. (Harvard University Press, 2007), 210. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 4. Frédéric Neyrat, *Literature and Materialisms*. (Routledge 2020), 162. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 5. Cary Wolfe, *Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (*Chicago University Press, 2020), x. My thinking of the “virtual” is indebted to Cary Wolfe’s discussion of scale within ecosystems as producing “virtual space,” writing that “here ‘virtual’ doesn’t mean ‘not real’ or ‘less real’; it means ‘*more* real’ \[…\] of innumerable equally valid realities.” [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 6. By actualizing the latent relations between existent networks, literary criticism makes them available as models for thinking. Many thanks to one of the audience members at the *Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference,* whose questions and subsequent discussion made clear my need to emphasize this point. My suggestion is not that simply “reading texts differently” is a force of change. Rather, I wish to demonstrate that texts relate to the world in ways that go beyond the intentions of any particular reader or writer. This is intended as a departure from the implicit assumption of many literary critics, that the resonances between texts and contexts is the product of literary critical reading, rather than a formal feature of texts. If we instead start from the assumption that texts form relations beyond the scale of the human—then we might begin to think literary study beyond anthropocentrism—considering instead what texts do with and without us. [\[Return to Section\]](#section33) 7. Italo Calvino, “Lightness” in *Six Memos for the Next Millennium.* Trans. Geoffery Brock (Mariner Books 2015), 14. [\[Return to Section\]](#section33) 8. Calvino 35 [\[Return to Section\]](#section33) 9. Charles Baudelaire, “Elevation” in *The Flowers of Evil,* trans. Nathan Brown (Verso 2024). I have modified Brown’s translation of “champs” by “regions.” Although that choice of word is accurate, “champs” might also be translated as “fields,” referring to both rural land and a domain of inquiry. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 10. Karen F. Quandt, “Baudelaire and the Poetics of Pollution” *Dix-Neuf* 19, no. 3 (2015): 244-59. [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) #### Suggested Citation Culpepper, Abigail. "How Are We Still Reading? Textual Sessility and Futurity" in *Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World*, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.