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Fungi

  • Karen Leona Anderson (author)
Chapter of: Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter(pp. 65–80)

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Metadata
TitleFungi
ContributorKaren Leona Anderson (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0396.1.06
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/microbium-the-neglected-lives-of-micro-matter/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightKaren Leona Anderson
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2023-09-07
Long abstractCulturally, fungi in the Anglo-American context have been seen as fascinating, bewildering, frightening, and grotesque, understood as an alien organism defying taxonomy; as a useful, coveted, and occasionally poisonous food or medicine; as a sign of mysterious ruin and decay; and as a vestige of magic or otherworldliness. In their microscopic structures and manifestations, likewise, fungi have historically been represented as insidious, rebellious, menacing, or baffling, and have been more broadly constructed as a threat to human scale. Twenty-first century attitudes towards fungi, on the other hand, celebrate these scale-shifting abilities with much greater optimism as a robust response to political and environmental crises: microscopic fungi and fungal growth have been recently represented in an explosion of visual art and cultural theory. Fungi in these accounts are an adaptive and resilient form of life that can serve both as a sustainable biotechnology and as a model for multispecies thriving in the face of social and economic marginalization. This entry traces the surprisingly short arc from mycophobia to mycophilia through the lens of scale shifting, from Alice in Wonderland’s size-altering mushroom to Jae Rhim Lee’s fungal burial suit.
Page rangepp. 65–80
Print length16 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • fungi
  • micro-matter
  • mycophobia
  • mushroom
  • poetry
Contributors

Karen Leona Anderson

(author)
Associate Professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland

Karen Leona Anderson is Associate Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Punish honey (Carolina Wren) and Receipt (Milkweed Editions). Her scholarly and creative work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including the ecolanguage reader, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and The Best American Poetry. Her most recent scholarly work is on Emily Dickinson, fungi, and scale shifting.