The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels
2015-08
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The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels
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2015-08
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Even as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were appalled by the acts of human atrocities at the height of World War II, they maintained that the human is the means to emancipation and enlightenment. The subsequent reaction to the war, however, takes a different course by taking up the concept of the human as a troubling category. A discourse of anti-humanism that emerges in Europe immediately after the War, is one example, and the recent theories of posthumanism are another, which refurbish the anti-humanist philosophy by focusing on issues such as human relationships to nonhuman species and to the ever-evolving technosciences. Their premise and conclusion is the same—the concept of the human as autonomous and self-determining must be displaced, as such attributes are a fiction leading to human domination and violence. “The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels” intervenes in this discourse, arguing that if as posthumanism implies humans are the very problem to be eliminated, no coherent ethics can be established, whose operation relies on humans as agents of its principles. The current renditions of posthumanism, however, withdraw their confidence from the human and misanthropically pit the human against itself, placing hope instead in the posthuman that is always yet to come. They posit that human problems can only be resolved by the human negating itself and announcing the death of its own subjectivity. In order to explore in detail the limits of these self-annihilating visions, I turn to novels by Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, and J. M. Coetzee, which engage with posthumanist themes by re-visioning the human: Atwood by constructing genetically enhanced “superhumans,” Butler by inter-species procreation, and Coetzee by “animalizing” the human. They write as though posthumanity has already arrived, but only to reveal knowingly and unknowingly the limits of posthuman existence. In the process, the novels leave room for the possibility of critical humanism by affirming the human’s self-reflexive capacity to rethink, undo, and reconstruct itself. At a time when the very concept of the human has fallen into disfavor, the novels prompt the readers to imagine a world that does not abandon the human and the legacy of emancipatory and resistant humanism.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2015. Major: English. Advisor: Timothy Brennan. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 207 pages.
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Ahn, Sunyoung. (2015). The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/206691.
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