Grieving the Ungrievable: Searching for Home through Nonhuman Becoming in Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s The Grassling

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to examine non-human agency in Elizabeth Jane Burnett’s The Grassling and Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank. Using a theoretical framework based on material ecocriticism, queer ecology and affect theory, the thesis explores how Burnett’s and Itō’s poetic narratives reconfigure the relationship between human and nonhuman in non-anthropocentric ways with the help of the irreal. The thesis discusses how the texts reimagine desire, moving from a Freudian view in which desire is repressed, to an understanding of desire as becoming as expressed by Deleuze. In the stories, humans metamorphose into plants, showing the interconnectedness of all matter and the importance of care exceeding species. These strands of the narratives contest anthropocentrism, and by extension also the heteropatriarchy to which it is related. Grief over traumatic experiences like family loss and migration in the stories are shown to be related to the loss of a planetary home as a result of climate change.