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Love can be both intoxicating and toxic. One desires to be taken over: enveloped, dissolved, decomposed, and one desires just as strongly to retain an individual shape. For this reason, Anne Carson describes erotic love as fundamentally ambivalent in her 1986 book, Eros the Bittersweet. As she puts…

The story of person-becoming-plant is not about reversal or reversion to some imagined natural state. Instead it provides a counterpoint to any quick-fix, back-to-the-land fantasy, which sees nature as distinct, permanent, unchanging, passive, authentic, and fundamentally good. The idea is not that…

One ambitious attempt to undo the individual-moral-adventure story was the postmodern systems novel, which intended to depict entire political, social, and technological systems by zooming in and out on figure and ground. The concept was introduced in the late eighties by the critic Tom LeClair, wh…