Inhuman Nature

The relationship between social thought and earth processes is in its infancy. This book offers to make good the defect by exploring how human induced changes impact upon planetary processes.

Collection of essays examining the ways in which humanity is enmeshed in its surroundings.

Emphasizing sustainability, balance, and the natural, green dominates our thinking about ecology like no other color. What about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the excessive? What of the ocean’s turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations? Prismatic Ecology moves beyond the accustomed green readings of ecotheory and maps a colorful world of ecological possibility. In a series of linked essays that span place, time, and discipline, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings together writers who illustrate the vibrant worlds formed by colors. Organized by the structure of a prism, each chapter explores the coming into existence of nonanthropocentric ecologies. “Red” engages sites of animal violence, apocalyptic emergence, and activism; “Maroon” follows the aurora borealis to the far North and beholds in its shimmering alternative modes of world composition; “Chartreuse” is a meditation on postsustainability and possibility within sublime excess; “Grey” is the color of the undead; “Ultraviolet” is a potentially lethal force that opens vistas beyond humanly known nature. Featuring established and emerging scholars from varying disciplines, this volume presents a collaborative imagining of what a more-than-green ecology offers. While highlighting critical approaches not yet common within ecotheory, the contributions remain diverse and cover a range of topics including materiality, the inhuman, and the agency of objects. By way of color, Cohen guides readers through a reflection of an essentially complex and disordered universe and demonstrates the spectrum as an unfinishable totality, always in excess of what a human perceives. Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Levi R. Bryant, Collin College; Lowell Duckert, West Virginia U; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bernd Herzogenrath, Goethe U of Frankfurt; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin, Italy; Eileen A. Joy; Robert McRuer, George Washington U; Tobias Menely, Miami U; Steve Mentz, St. John’s U, New York City; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Margaret Ronda, Rutgers U; Will Stockton, Clemson U; Allan Stoekl, Penn State U; Ben Woodard; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.

Beauty versus beasts. In the wake of a devastating biological disaster, the United States east of the Mississippi River has been abandoned. Now called the Feral Zone, a reference to the virus that turned millions of people into bloodthirsty savages, the entire area is off-limits. The punishment for violating the border is death.Lane McEvoy can't imagine why anyone would risk it. She's grown up in the shadow of the great wall separating east from west, and she's curious about what's on the other side - but not that curious. Life in the west is safe, comfortable . . . sanitized. Which is just how she likes it.But Lane gets the shock of her life when she learns that someone close to her has crossed into the Feral Zone. And she has little choice but to follow. Lane travels east, risking life and limb and her very DNA, completely unprepared for what she finds in the ruins of civilization . . . and afraid to learn whether her humanity will prove her greatest strength or a fatal weakness.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Institut für Anglistik), course: Children's Literature, language: English, abstract: In her book The Second Sex (Beauvoir 1953: 362) the world-famous French philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir writes that “[t]he adolescent girl will devote a special love to Nature: still more than the adolescent boy, she worships it. Unconquered, inhuman Nature subsumes most clearly the totality of what exists. The adolescent girl has not yet acquired for her use any portion of the universal: hence it is her kingdom as a whole; when she takes possession of it, she also proudly takes possession of herself.” The idea of nature as a safe haven and retreat where a young girl refuges to and repeatedly finds solace and empowerment also penetrates children’s literature. What Annis Pratt calls The Green-World Archetype (Pratt 1981: 16-24), “an adolescent girl who lives close to nature, is one of the most common female protagonists in children’s fiction”. (Nikolajewa 2002: 332) Nature features prominently in the novels of the 20th century Canadian authoress Lucy Maud Montgomery best known for her classic girl’s book Anne of Green Gables. In all of her books Montgomery’s protagonists are female heroes. The heroines of her novels and short stories vary from each other in age. Out of her twenty-one books eleven focus on female protagonists in late childhood or early adolescence of about nine to approximately eleven years of age. (Epperly 1992: 7) A prominent theme that runs through all of those novels is the development of self-confidence of the, at the outset of the story, powerless young heroine. Throughout the storylines each one of the young girls “learns to value herself in relation to the surrounding community and culture” (Epperly 1992: 7) - and nature, more precisely the fictionally adapted landscape of L.M. Montgomery’s beloved Prince Edward Island, seems to play a vital part in that process. In her monograph The Fragrance of Sweetgrass Epperly states that in the first book of the Anne of Green Gables series “three quarters of the novel’s nature descriptions are offered as though through Anne’s eyes”. (Epperly 1992: 18) What is true for Anne of Green Gables can also be observed in Montgomery’s other children’s fictions. Throughout her books the Canadian authoress enables the reader to perceive nature through the eyes of her adolescent or child heroines; thus enabling us to detect what kind of effects the natural surroundings might have on the female protagonist’s psyche and psychological development while she is growing up.