Critique of Pure Nature / Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress Bd.26 (PDF)

This book challenges the Western contemporary "praise for Nature". From food to body practices, from ecological discourses to the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary imaginaries abound with representations of an ideal "pure Nature", essentially defined according to a logic of denial of any artificial, modified, manipulated - in short, cultural - aspect.

The author addresses these fundamental issues, combining an initial theoretical problematisation of the concept of nature and its evolution - from classical philosophy to the crucial changes occurred through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism and the modern era, finally considering recent insights in philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology and semiotics - with the analysis of its discursivisation - from the iconography of Mother Nature between the past and the present to the representation of catastrophic events in fictional and non-fictional texts, from clean eating and other popular food trends to the ambivalence of the naked body between its supposed natural ascription and its multiple cultural characterisations. Thus she introduces a critique of pure Nature, providing a systematic study of the way nature is attributed meaning and value in some of today's most relevant discourses and practices, and finally tracing a possible path towards an "internatural turn".