Fungi, Rhizomes and Webs: How Literature Can Grow New Routes.

This article considers how literature reaches a variety of different audiences and can effect practical change within a wider social ecosystem through the concepts of the 'wood wide web' and 'thinking mycorrhizally', developed here as part of a pragmatic 'sympoietics' of action. I first set out how these terms, stemming initially from forest ecology research and environmental humanities respectively, allow us to conceptualize literary texts as an epistemological species that both draws on and further contributes to our understanding of interspecies communication. What is at stake is therefore not just how we might live together in a broken world but how we might know about this living together and seek to do so in a more systemically just way. This particular kind of relationality is explored through the case study of contemporary German author, poet and performer, Ulrike Almut Sandig and her remediation of stories by the Brothers Grimm and the different kinds of communication that follow. The different routes for literature thus explored have repercussions for the role of the literary critic and his or her remediation of literary networks around the globe. These repercussions are teased out with an eye to very practical applications of literature, and the expertise of the literary scholar, in a variety of non-literary contexts but with a particular focus on working with professional government and community-based decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]