The New Human in Literature
The New Human in Literature

Author: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-09-26

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1441114068

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Twentieth-century literature changed understandings of what it meant to be human. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, in this historical overview, presents a record of literature's changing ideas of mankind, questioning the degree to which literature records and creates visions of the new human. Grounded in the theory of Niklas Luhmann and drawing on canonical works, Thomsen uses literary changes in the mind, body and society to define the new human. He begins with the modernist minds of Virginia Woolf, Williams Carlos Williams and Louis-Ferdinand Celine's, discusses the society-changing concepts envisioned by Chinua Achebe, Mo Yan and Orhan Pamuk. He concludes with science fiction, discussing Don DeLillo and Michel Houellebecq's ideas of revolutionizing man through biotechnology. This is a study about imagination, aesthetics and ethics that demonstrates literature's capacity to not only imagine the future but portray the conflicting desires between individual and various collectives better than any other media. A study that heightens reflections on human evolution and posthumanism.

Prophets of the Posthuman
Prophets of the Posthuman

Author: Christina Bieber Lake

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 026815869X

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Prophets of the Posthuman provides a fresh and original reading of fictional narratives that raise the question of what it means to be human in the face of rapidly developing bioenhancement technologies. Christina Bieber Lake argues that works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, Raymond Carver, James Tiptree, Jr., and Margaret Atwood must be reevaluated in light of their contributions to larger ethical questions. Drawing on a wide range of sources in philosophical and theological ethics, Lake claims that these writers share a commitment to maintaining a category of personhood more meaningful than that allowed by utilitarian ethics. Prophets of the Posthuman insists that because technology can never ask whether we should do something that we have the power to do, literature must step into that role. Each of the chapters of this interdisciplinary study sets up a typical ethical scenario regarding human enhancement technology and then illustrates how a work of fiction uniquely speaks to that scenario, exposing a realm of human motivations that might otherwise be overlooked or simplified. Through the vision of the writers she discusses, Lake uncovers a deep critique of the ascendancy of personal autonomy as America’s most cherished value. This ascendancy, coupled with technology’s glamorous promises of happiness, helps to shape a utilitarian view of persons that makes responsible ethical behavior toward one another almost impossible. Prophets of the Posthuman charts the essential role that literature must play in the continuing conversation of what it means to be human in a posthuman world.

Sympathetic Imagination
Sympathetic Imagination

Author: Kent Aardse

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13:

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Martha Nussbaum insists on the power of “sympathetic imagining” for considering the lives of nonhuman animals. Literature, for Nussbaum, is a powerful site for imaging the lives of animals. This study extends Nussbaum's “sympathetic imagining” into the realm of digital art-- namely, electronic literature and digital games. I explore how digital art intersects with posthumanism, via three distinct areas: biopolitics, animal studies, and eco-criticism. Posthumanism rejects anthropocentrism in favour of considering our own affinities and similarities with all living creatures in the world. It is a call to pay strict attention to our shared finitude and vulnerability with nonhumans, and change our ways of thinking and being accordingly to ensure the continued survival of our world and its inhabitants. I argue that digital media affords us the ability to think past our anthropocentrism, opening up a space for us to consider our relationship to nonhuman animals, other humans, and the ecological world. I provide critical readings of electronic literature and digital games, which I believe illustrate the sympathetic imagining power of digital media. I see digital media as providing a site of speculation, a means to better understand and consider the role and position of the human imbricated and implicated within a networked ecology consisting of a multitude of creatures of life, all subjects of finitude and vulnerability.

Posthuman Pathogenesis
Posthuman Pathogenesis

Author: Taylor & Francis Group

Publisher: Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities

Published: 2022-05-20

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9781032264264

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This multi-vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to contagions provides insights into the companionship of posthumanities, environmental humanities, and medical humanities, to shed light on how we deal with complex issues like communicable diseases in contemporary times. Examining imaginary and real contagions, ranging from Jeep and SHEVA to plague, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19, Posthuman Pathogenesis discusses the inextricable links between nature and culture, matter and meaning-making practices, and the human and the nonhuman. Dissecting pathogenic nonhuman bodies in their interactions with their human counterparts and the environment, the authors of this volume raise their diverse voices with two primary aims: to analyse how contagions trigger a drive to survival, and chaotic, liberating, and captivating impulses, and to focus on the viral interpolations in socio-political and environmental systems as a meeting point of science, technology, and fiction, blending social reality and myth. Following the premises of the post-qualitative turn and presenting a differentiated experience of contagion, this 'rhizomatic' compilation thus offers a non-hierarchised array of essays, composed by a multiplicity of genders, geographies, and generations.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination
Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination

Author: Kristen Lillvis

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017-09-01

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 0820351237

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Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monáe. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term “posthuman blackness” to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory—an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality—in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Morrison’s Beloved. Reading neo–slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.

Mediating Vulnerability
Mediating Vulnerability

Author: Anneleen Masschelein

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1800081138

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Mediating Vulnerability examines vulnerability from a range of connected perspectives. It responds to the vulnerability of species, their extinction but also their transformation. This tension between extreme danger and creativity is played out in literary studies through the pressures the discipline brings to bear on its own categories, particularly those of genre. Extinction and preservation on the one hand, transformation, adaptation and (re)mediation on the other. These two poles inform our comparative and interdisciplinary project. The volume is situated within the particular intercultural and intermedial context of contemporary cultural representation. Vulnerability is explored as a site of potential destruction, human as well as animal, but also as a site of potential openness. This is the first book to bring vulnerability studies into dialogue with media and genre studies. It is organised in four sections: ‘Human/Animal’; Violence/Resistance’; ‘Image/Narrative’; and ‘Medium/Genre’. Each chapter considers the intersection of vulnerability and genre from a comparative perspective, bringing together a team of international contributors and editors. The book is in dialogue with the reflections of Judith Butler and others on vulnerability, and it questions categories of genre through an interdisciplinary engagement with different representational forms, including digital culture, graphic novels, video games, photography and TV series, in addition to novels and short stories. It offers new readings of high-profile contemporary authors of fiction including Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as well as bringing lesser-known figures to the fore.