The Gloom in the Attic: Fungal Networks as Ecofeminist Adaptation Studies
摘要
Adaptations, like fungi, have been framed as contagious, life-sucking parasites, but adaptations, like fungi, participate in networks that preserve the lives of source texts and ensure they survive (and potentially thrive) in new environments. This chapter focuses on Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s postcolonial Gothic novel, Mexican Gothic (2020), to illustrate how adaptation networks promote symbiotic relationships between texts. Moreno-Garcia capitalizes on the similarities between adaptation and fungi in popular culture and, in the process, models an ecofeminist approach to adaptation studies. Her use of fungal networks to illustrate textual adaptation demonstrates new ways in which contemporary adaptors embed adaptation networks in their texts’ environments, making adaptation a part of the mycorrhizal network and, by proxy, a part of the textual “wood wide web.”