Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as literature, architecture, philosophy, and education), Alain Beauclair and Josh Toth's Nature and Its Unnatural Relations: Points of Access intercedes in ongoing debates about accessing, defining, and respecting a world humans continue to misuse and misunderstand-and that, as a result, is becoming increasingly inhospitable. The chapters shuttle between a variety of aesthetic and philosophical concerns-from theology and Biblical interpretation to colonialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, worlding, posthumanism, and speculative realism. These varied approaches are united by a single aporetic thread: efforts to surmount the problem of "human access" invariably risk repeating (ever more blindly) the violence and immorality of anthropocentrism. We seem trapped in the cul-de-sac of the Anthropocene. To discover potential new exits, the contributors consider whether it is possible or advisable to abandon so-called "correlationism"-of art, of literature, of technology. If it is, then how? If not, how might we more ethically reembrace our innately corruptive relations with a world of non-human others? How might we free "nature" (finally) from the demands of human action and human thought without mendaciously reinscribing humanity's distance from it or denying a proximity that is only traversable by artificial means?
Alain Beauclair is associate professor in the Department of Humanities at MacEwan University. Josh Toth is professor of English at MacEwan University.
Introduction: What we Know (to be Unrelatable) by Alain Beauclair and Josh Toth Prologue: How to Advocate-Radically, Kindly [A Transcript, A Conversation] by Tracey Lindberg Part I: Outside Structures Chapter 1: Encountering the Mountain: A Sketch for a Hermeneutics of Nature by Ruairidh J. Brown Chapter 2: Kawabata's Sealed Play: Restoration and Reenchantment by Eric Bronson Chapter 3: A Principled Account of Artistic Sublimity in Kant's Critique of Judgment by Joshua D.F. Hooke Chapter 4: Architecture and the Ends of Man: Derrida, Latour, Eisenman by Henrik Oxvig and Dag Petersson Part II: Before Nature Chapter 5: Nature and Dominion in Genesis by Robert Burch Chapter 6: Making the Hands Impure: On the Role of Orality in Becoming Responsible for the More-Than-Human World by Kaleb Cohen Chapter 7: The Narrator's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" in Howard O'Hagan's Tay John by Sergiy Yakovenko Chapter 8: Romanticism and the Anthropocene: Mirrors and Inversions in Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, and Melville by Samantha C. Harvey Part III: Reading Otherwise Chapter 9: Beyond Negative Ecology: Earth Art in a Time of Climate Crisis by John Culbert Chapter 10: Re-calibrating Responses: De-conditioning Our Relationship to the Natural World Through Literature by Jennifer Carmichael Chapter 11: I Don't Believe in the Sun: Symbolic Action and Mythic Explanation in Klara and the Sun by Ammon Allred Chapter 12: Badiou's Scientific Event and Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun by Adriel M. Trott Epilogue: Moral Grandstanding by Claire Colebrook
