Suppose that critical posthumanism invites us to say goodbye to ‘literature’ and to welcome it back in the same moment. So, “for centuries”, observes Jonathan Franzen, “ink in the form of printed novels has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives”.[1] Humanist subjectivity and exceptionalism were instantiated in the ink and print cultures of ‘letters’, continuous […]
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From Joyce to Beckett: The Fiction of the Almost ‘Posthuman’[1] When Samuel Beckett took James Joyce as his role model, Joyce had completed Ulysses and was immerged in the composition of Finnegans Wake. This ‘work in progress’ had a particular structure that followed a principle discovered at the end of Ulysses. The ending of the […]
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The digital turn in filmmaking provides the potential to communicate a posthuman perspective on the interrelationship between human and nonhuman realities. The fluid sense of interconnection that defines this expanded subject position has been defined variously by scholars of the posthuman. In her landmark 1999 work How We Became Posthuman, Katherine N. Hayles describes the […]
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Posthuman topology refers to posthumanism in a phenomenological mode. It is the study of how the experience of technological artefacts and technic environments – the environments of their development and use – shapes the manner in which the individual thinks and occupies his or her lifeworld, beyond a simple psychological affect. Posthuman topology maintains that […]
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Posthuman suffering, as presented in Anthony Miccoli’s Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace[1] is an affective state characterised by a perceived feeling of inadequacy, alienation, or lack of agency or efficacy in relation to technological artefacts or systems of use. The term can also be used to describe the general sense that the biological […]
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If one accepts the widely-used definition of electronic literature as literature that is ‘born digital’, one can immediately sense the ways in which electronic literature may be thought of as a literature, if there is any, of the posthuman, or at least, literature which problematises its own relationship with the human. Katherine Hayles takes this […]
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The medical humanities were developed as a means of using the tools offered by several fields in the humanities – law, history, and literature among others – to improve or interrogate experiences of healthcare and patienthood. Humanities training for doctors, particularly, has been valued in that it encourages medics to listen to their patients […]
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As many current children’s films, immersed as they are in digital culture, fetishise an old book in an attic or a fairytale tome whose old illustrations come strangely to life, books as objects have begun to take on cultural freight as fossil traces of the human, even as we are still here, coining terms like […]
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What if middleness did not suppose progress?[1] What if, for example, instead of looking to discern a ‘premodernism’ and a ‘prehumanism’ that lead naturally to modernism and humanism and thence to postmodernism and posthumanism we imagined time as a vortex rather than a line? What if we abandoned human-centric narratives of history altogether, narratives […]
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As the era preceding the articulation of what has come to be known as humanism, the European Middle Ages offer a variety of vantage points from which to trouble present certainties, complicate contemporary narratives of what the human means, and set new trajectories for the future of posthumanist thought. The medieval period does not […]
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