"The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours," noted American anthropologist Loren C. Eiseley in 1957. Building on Eiseley's "big narrative" of an "age of flowers," this lecture examines the role of scale in our understanding of the floral world. How does the coevolution of humans and flowers relate to the perception of flowers as insignificant details? What significance does the relative size of flowers have for their elevated role as objects of human imagination? How are scale and media of the floral world interconnected?
Isabel Kranz is a literary scholar who researches the relationship between literature and botany. She is the author of "Speaking Flowers: An ABC of Plant Language" (2014), "Spatialized Past: Walter Benjamin's Poetics of History" (2011), and co-editor of "The Languages of Flowers: Media of Floral Communication" (2016).
