Dead Leaves Walking

One of the many pleasures reading Jeff VanderMeer’s first YA novel A Peculiar Peril (2020) is the vegetal weirdness of his imagined world, the “wildness” that lingers long after reading. A dandelion sprout “uproots itself and roams” the land, while talking potatoes and carrots duck out of sight. A tree-creature named “No Tongues” offers wisdom at a local bar until its “vine-self sprouts tiny white flowers” and suddenly withers into flakes. Following the success of his earlier ecofiction, especially The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) and Borne (2017), A Peculiar Peril introduces younger readers to VanderMeer’s uniquely grotesque ecological visions: dreamlike allegories of vegetal, animal, and mineral assemblages that, in their eerie familiarity, sharpen our conception of humanness as composite-being.

Because VanderMeer often probes the limits of representation – of the capacity for fiction to imagine otherwise – his work is at once quite simple, elemental even, and yet theoretically sophisticated. It blurs the usual categories we have for genre, audience, and even reading level. Using botanical examples from VanderMeer’s fiction within the multilingual Norwegian EFL classroom, specifically grades 8-10, this chapter explores the opportunities for and limitations of “New Weird” literature like VanderMeer’s to develop ecopedagogies in the age of environmental crisis.

With A Peculiar Peril as a case study text for interdisciplinary, sustainable language education, I articulate a framework for the teaching of environmental literature through narrative technique and genre studies to help students meet many of the learning outcomes and competency aims of the 2020 Norwegian national curriculum (Kunnskapsløftet 20, or LK20), in English and a variety of related subjects. Although my context is the contemporary Norwegian educational system, this framework has practical applications for students and teachers around the world. VanderMeer, I contend, enables us to see more clearly the potential of vegetal ecofiction to translate curiosity and environmental consciousness into teaching practices and, ultimately, a politics of ecological care.