Browsing by Subject "posthumanism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Darwin and the Digital Body: Evolution, Posthumanism, and Imaginative Spaces of Possibility
    (2012-05-30) Fierke, Jennifer
    Talking about embodiment is political, whether the discussion is about “race,” gender, “ability,” size or body modification. Despite significant leaps forward in equity during the twentieth century, beings continue to be constrained—practically, intellectually, emotionally, sexually, and expressively—because of how we imagine bodies. This project brings embodiment into relief by focusing on two seemingly disparate theories: Victorian evolutionary theory and posthumanism. Both are explored via the dual lenses of nineteenth-century speculative fiction and works of fantastic digital media, providing theoretical and cultural frameworks for challenging dominant paradigms of embodiment.
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    The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels
    (2015-08) Ahn, Sunyoung
    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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    Living Enfleshment Otherwise:" Articulating Embodiment Across Transatlantic Modernisms"
    (2021-06) Rodine, Zoe
    This dissertation traces the language authors employ to describe visceral experience in the literature of the past century and asks: how does the way we articulate embodiment reveal the ways we push against our received notions about the body, and how does our language in turn shape the reality of the human body and even shift our definitions of the human? Through an examination of a variety of interdisciplinary texts—novels, poetry, songs, film, live performance, archival documents—I discover a particular resonance between Afrofuturist and modernist models for embodiment that suggest an alternate genealogy of modernist authorship based on a shared aesthetic and ethical project of revisioning the human. The texts this project examines reveal the degree to which the concept of the human body is in no way essentially or naturally true, and has historically been a racializing, exclusionary construct; this dissertation does the essential work of teasing out just how bodies are constructed, identifying three structures that materialize modernist bodies anew. The first chapter describes the undulatory body, tracing the way that waves structure embodiment in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sun Ra’s music and poetry. The second chapter, which links Mina Loy’s poetry, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and Douglas Kearney’s verse and nonfiction, focuses on the possibilities and limitations of our increasing enmeshment with machines. The final chapter theorizes the horrified body through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, positing that horror has the potential to productively erode boundaries between bodies. Re-centering the body as a foundational critical concern for modernism and literary studies more broadly reveals the sinews that animate texts by Black and white authors alike, illuminates the long history of resistance to the hegemonic constructions of the body, and provides building blocks for negotiating a twenty-first century subjectivity that goes beyond the previously established boundaries of the human.