Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance. Among the topics explored are the futurity that inheres in storms and wrecks, wood that resists its burning or offers art and dwelling, hymns that implant themselves like viruses, the ontology of everyday objects, the seep and flow of substance, the resistant nature of matter, the dependence of community upon making things public, and the interstices at which nature and culture become inseparable.
Tinker as you will.
TABLE OF CONTENTS // Jeffrey Jerome Cohen — Introduction: Ecostitial / Steve Mentz — Shipwreck / Anne Harris — Hewn / Alan Montroso — Human / Valerie Allen — Matter / Lowell Duckert — Recreation / Alfred Kentigern Siewers — Trees / James Smith — Fluid / Ian Bogost — Inhuman
About the Editor
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor of English and director of the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute. The author of numerous books and articles on the meeting of the post-humanities with the distant past, his most recent work includes the edited collections Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (punctum, 2012) and Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minnesota, 2013), and Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minnesota, 2015).