| Sumario: | This essay explores the significance of collaboration as part of an ecology of enlightenment that stretches from the eighteenth century to the present day. It investigates the ways in which research on plant life and the vegetal world has led the author away from an embrace of the Enlightenment as an era of optimism and toward an acknowledgement of vulnerability, precarity, and ambivalence as defining experiences of eighteenth-century life for both humans and non-humans. It suggests that ecocriticism can involve not only a recognition of the interconnections binding together various living beings, but an embrace of the enmeshment of humans with one another, in creative and intellectual projects as well as in the rhythms of daily life. Finally, the essay calls for greater institutional recognition of collaborative work within the US academy.
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