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Curry, Elizabeth. "Refiguring the Animal: Race, Posthumanism, and Modernism." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/24546.
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This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections in early-twentieth-century American literature. While animals, with their physical and behavioral features and subordinate status within Western cultural frameworks, were fundamental figures in the US racial imaginary, which relied on dehumanization as a weapon of control, animals (and conceptions about them) also curiously offered a way around and outside of the categorically demeaning declarations of “the human.” Through literary explorations of the nonhuman, the writers in this project reveal forms of interspecies affinity and understanding that affirm biotic connection and also make fantastically strange creatures with whom humans share domestic and proximal space. The figure of “the human” as separate, above, and radically distinct from other life becomes not only strange as well through these readings, but becomes visible as a prominent obstacle to social egalitarian and ecologically cooperative ways of living. I build on research in animal studies and critical race studies approaches to posthumanism to observe how race inflects literary animal representations while also tracking how animality interacts with various notions of personhood. While animalization often coincides with racialized and dehumanized personhood status, writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Zitkala-Ša rupture those associations and engage the animal (comparisons to it and becomings with it) as a fundamentally humanizing figure. On the flip side, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how a racialized animalization trope operates in the novel to defend the killing of a black man. These writers all collapse the binary between human and animal while demonstrating how that binary operates in concert with racial binaries in an American context that extols the human. Reading animals through a lens that acknowledges how race and animality intersect ultimately opens routes for rethinking what it means to be human and defining how we view the nonhuman.
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McBlane, Angus. "Corporeal ontology : Merleau-Ponty, flesh, and posthumanism." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2013. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/56960/.
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As posthumanism has developed in the last twenty-five years there has been hesitation in elucidating a robust posthumanist engagement with the body. My thesis redresses this gap in the literature in three intertwined ways. First, it is a critical assessment of posthumanism broadly, focusing on how the body is read in its discourse and how there is a continuation of a humanist telos in terms which revolve around the body. Second, it is a philosophical interrogation, adaptation, and transformation of aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing its reading on Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, with additional material drawn from his works on language, aesthetics, and ontology. Third, it is a critical analysis of four films drawn from that seemingly most posthumanist of genres, science fiction: Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor, and Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. Science fiction is the meeting place of popular and critical posthumanist imaginaries as the vast majority of texts on posthumanism (in whatever form) ground their analyses in a science fiction of some kind. By reading posthumanism through the work of Merleau-Ponty I outline a posthumanist ontology of corporeality which both demonstrates the limitations of how posthumanism has done its analyses of the body and elucidates an opening and levelling not adequately considered in posthumanist analyses of the body. Following Merleau-Ponty I argue that there is a ‘belongingness of the body to being and the corporeal relevance of every being’, yet, the body is not the singular purview of the human. There are alternative embodiments and bodies which have been previously overlooked and that all bodies (be they embodied organically, technologically, virtually or otherwise) are corporeal.
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Lin, Lidan. "The Rhetoric of Posthumanism in Four Twentieth-Century International Novels." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278990/.
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The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross-cultural friendship in A Passage to India; Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River--all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual as an autonomous constitution has undergone a transformation marked by the emphasis on locating selfhood not in the insular and static Self but in the mutable middle space connecting the Self and the Other.
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Nilsson, Anna. "Cyborgkvinnan och korrespondenserna : Posthumanism och esoteriska inslag i Majgull Axelssons roman Aprilhäxan." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Avdelningen för språk och litteratur, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-157597.
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Syftet med studiet är att undersöka hur romanens protagonist kan läsas som en posthumanistisk karaktär, där det granskas hur hon relaterar till Haraways cyborg, men också till delar av Barads teori om agentiell materialism. En alternativ läsning utförs genom att granska karaktären utifrån ett esoteriskt perspektiv, där tonvikten ligger på andliga inslag. De två perspektiven möjliggör en läsning utifrån två till synes mycket olika synvinklar, vilka dock tycks bestå av vissagemensamma tendenser. Målet med studien blir således även att granska hur posthumanism och esoterism kan knytas samman, och hur April häxans huvudperson Desirée kan betraktas som ett center för denna sammanföring. Frågeställningarna lyder enligt följande: Hur kan huvudpersonen Desirée läsas utifrån en posthumanistisk teoribildning? Vilka esoteriska inslag manifesteras i karaktären? Vilka esoteriska inslag manifesteras i karaktären?Hur relaterar posthumanism och esoterism till varandra?
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Vinci, Tony M. "Ghost, Animal, Android: Trauma, Posthuman Ethics, and Radical Vulnerability in American Literature, 1940-2010." OpenSIUC, 2014. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/857.
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Ghost, Animal, Android: Trauma, Posthuman Ethics, and Radical Vulnerability in American Literature, 1940-2010 The dissertation argues that the literary topoi of the ghost, animal, and android function as ethical categories offering access to traces of trauma that operate beyond the boundaries of the human. The study revises the traditional argument that the literatures of trauma work to heal the victims of personal and cultural catastrophes by emphasizing work by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, William Heyen, and Philip K. Dick that resists an oversimplified notion of healing and instead experiments with nonhuman models of subjectivity as means through which to manage open wounds. Able to register traumatic events at the very edge of understanding, canonical and popular depictions of the ghost, animal, and android disturb readers into an ethics of radical vulnerability, encouraging them to cross subjective and cultural thresholds and become vulnerable to the present but elusive pain of others.
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Ferebee, Kristin Michelle. "Radiant Beings: Narratives of Contamination and Mutation in Literatures of the Anthropocene." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1554724339910557.
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Finn, Richelle V. "“More Human Than Human”: Lacan’s Mirror Stage Theory and Posthumanism in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" ScholarWorks@UNO, 2018. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2460.
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In my thesis, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is examined using French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory. In the novel, humans have built androids that are almost indistinguishable from humans except that they lack a sense of empathy, or so the humans believe. The Voigt-Kampff Machine is a polygraph-like device used to determine if a subject shows signs of empathy in order to confirm if one is an android or a human. Yet, should empathy be the defining quality of determining humanity?
In his article "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the ‘I’ as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," Lacan refers to a particular critical milestone in an infant's psychological development. When the baby looks in a mirror, they come to the realization that the image they are seeing is not just any ordinary image; it is actually themselves in the mirror. This "a-ha" moment of self-realization is what Lacan's Mirror Stage Theory is based on. According to Lacan's theory, the image that the child sees in a mirror becomes an "Other" through which they will always scrutinize and pass judgment on, for it is not how they have pictured themselves to be in their mind’s eye.
I hypothesize that the androids are humans' artificial and technological Other. It is my thought that Dick uses the conflict of determining the biological from the artificial, the effort to differentiate humans from androids and biological animals from artificial ones, to illustrate Lacan's psychoanalysis of the mirror stage and its importance in our continual search for determining what humanity is and who we really are.
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Taylor, Rebekah Ann. "Anthropocene Modernisms: Ecological Expressions of the "Human Age" in Eliot, Williams, Toomer, and Woolf." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461270901.
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Mikaela, Ehn Svensson. "Dæmoner, katter och talande björnar : Icke-mänskliga karaktärer i Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för kultur och lärande, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-41096.
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Fantasy literature has a long history of including a wide array of non-human characters, each more fantastical than the other. But can these characters also be used to question anthropocentric beliefs or are their portrayal just a way to reinforce those ideas? Because fantasy literature, especially earlier examples in the fantasy canon, tend to include a lot of allusions to religion in general and Christianity in particular, is the question more complex than it first might seem. This thesis therefore aims to examine the portrayal of non-human characters in the works of one of the last 25 years most bestselling fantasy authors, Philip Pullman. It’s a well-known fact that Pullman isn’t a fan of organized religion, which sometimes is very noticeable in his trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000). The trilogy includes several kinds of non-human characters and one of the most central aims of the thesis is to examine how these portrayals relate to the undermining or reproduction of anthropocentric ideas. Because Pullmans alternative theology is so central to the trilogy’s narrative, it will also play a part in my examination.Denna uppsats är en undersökning av de icke-mänskliga karaktärer som figurerar i Philip Pullmans fantasytrilogi His Dark Materials (1995–2000). Litteratur inom fantasygenren har en lång historia av att inkludera en stor mängd av icke-mänskliga karaktärer, den ena mer fantastisk än den andra. Kan dessa karaktärer användas för att problematisera den antropocentrism som genomsyrar det västerländska samhället eller är deras gestaltande endast exempel på hur dessa föreställningar reproduceras? Eftersom fantasy, speciellt äldre exempel, ofta har allusioner till religion i allmänhet och kristendom i synnerhet, är frågan mer komplex än den först verkar. Pullman är känd för sin kritik av organiserad religion och i His Dark Materials skriver han fram en alternativ teologi. Denna uppsats undersöker således inte bara gestaltningen av de icke-mänskliga karaktärerna och hur de relaterar till eventuell problematisering och/eller återskapande av antropocentriska normer, utan också den roll Pullmans teologi spelar i relation till detta. I slutändan är också förhoppningen att denna uppsats kan visa hur litteratur, och framför allt den som faller inom fantasygenren, kan vara ett verktyg för att diskutera och problematisera antropocentriska föreställningar.
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Hausmann, Mark. "Concrete Reality: The Posthuman Landscapes of J.G. Ballard." Chapman University Digital Commons, 2016. http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_theses/3.
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While the fiction of J.G. Ballard has been primarily explored through postmodern criticism, his narratives and settings predict major issues concerning the contemporary discourse of posthumanism. His texts explore the escalating economic, social, and ecological crises converging within the material conditions of human urbanization and late capitalism. Nearly all of Ballard’s novels are as much about locations undergoing a crisis as they are about individuals or communities coming to embrace some extended period of human hysteria. His characters in The Drought, Concrete Island, and Super- Cannes, each progress through ecologically and socially alienating surroundings which invigorate them to act against classical humanism’s hegemonic and anthropocentric tendencies. By applying Henri Lefebvre’s spatial concept of “abstract space” to Ballard’s range of urban settings, this thesis investigates how Ballard’s early, middle, and late, novels continually put materiality, humanism, and technological landscapes, through different ecological and geopolitical crises in order to deconstruct a number of cultural and ideological concerns posthumanist studies seek to address.
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Dargue, Joseph W. "Heuristic Futures: Reading the Digital Humanities through Science Fiction." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439301885.
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Hirao, Akiko. "Binding a Universe: The Formation and Transmutations of the Best Japanese SF (Nenkan Nihon SF Kessakusen) Anthology Series." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20723.
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The annual science fiction anthology series The Best Japanese SF started publication in 2009 and showcases domestic writers old and new and from a wide range of publishing backgrounds. Although representative of the second golden era of Japanese science fiction in print in its diversity and with an emphasis on that year in science fiction, as the volumes progress the editors’ unspoken agenda has become more pronounced, which is to create a set of expectations for the genre and to uphold writers Project Itoh and EnJoe Toh as exemplary of this current golden era. This thesis analyzes the context of the anthology series’ publication, how the anthology is constructed, and these two writers’ contributions to the genre as integral to the anthologies and important to the younger generation of writers in the genre.
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Hogue, Alex. "I, (Post)Human: Being and Subjectivity in the Quest to Build Artificial People." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1468574783.
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Shirley, Beth J. "Adapting Environmental Ethics and Behaviors: Toward a Posthuman Rhetoric of Community Engagement." DigitalCommons@USU, 2019. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/7513.
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What persuades people one way or another to accept or deny climate change? More importantly, what persuades people to act on, ignore, or even be defiant of climate change? We would like to think that people are motivated when they hear the science explained clearly and when they are presented with a clear understanding of how their actions have a lasting impact. Yet the science on climate change has been made clear for some time, and doubt in climate change science is rampant (at least in the United States).
This dissertation seeks to answer these questions and develop a new methodology for persuading people to change their behaviors to be more environmentally friendly. I discuss a rhetorical theory called new materialism (a branch of posthumanism) that looks at the impact that nonhuman factors have on an audience’s decision-making. I apply that theory to the study of technical communication in three case studies of rural communities in Utah, Morocco, and Ohio, learning from local knowledges and seeking to understand what persuades these audiences’ in a more complex way than we may have previously thought. I conclude by suggesting what approaches communicators might take with these communities in the future toward engaging them in making the behavior changes that are necessary to mitigate the human contribution to climate change.
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Ring, Isa. "Frankenstein; or, the trials of a posthuman subject : An investigation of the Monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and his attempt at acquiring human subjectivity in a posthuman state." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Engelska, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-34419.
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley and the characters within, tell a prominent story of the posthuman condition in a society where humanist thought is the only conception of subjectivity. The use of not only posthuman studies, but more specifically studies including subjectivity was needed, in order to analyse the relationship between the humanist and the posthuman subjects. Theories of posthuman subjectivity and subjectivity by Rosi Braidotti and Michel Foucault were used in order to examine the posthuman condition of “Frankenstein’s monster” and the role of humanist vs. posthuman subjectivity between Victor Frankenstein and the monster. The tension between Victor and the monster was analysed in order to investigate the monster’s struggle at acquiring subjectivity in a posthuman state, which revealed why it is impossible for the humanist and posthuman subject to peacefully coexist.
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Merryman, Walter Emerson. "Bodies In and Out of Information: Consumption and Life in the Virtual." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1404483340.
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Andreasson, Linnéa. "Icke-verbal kommunikation mellan människa och djur i litteratur : En interdisciplinär studie om hur David Wroblewskis The Story of Edgar Sawtelle rekonstruerar förhållandet mellan djuriskhet och funktionshinder." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Litteraturvetenskap, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-38312.
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In reading The story of Edgar Sawtelle, this essay applies posthuman studies with animal studies and disability studies to analyse how the communication between species occur and how boundaries are expanded. Non-verbal language is closely examined and argued to be just as viable as verbal language in the making of relationships and subjects in literature. By applying posthumanism, biological research and a non-anthropocentric way of thinking one can evolve from the notion that humans are the only subjects which matter, something that has been verified because non-human animals never have been given a voice or an acknowledgment of a language. What happens in a novel when the main protagonist is lacking the ability to speak verbally, when verbal language is what has constructed human exceptionalism over all the other species?Denna uppsats tillämpar posthumanistiska studier med djurstudier och funktionshinder-studier för att analysera hur kommunikationen mellan arter äger rum och expanderar gränser i David Wroblewskis roman The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Icke-verbalt språk undersöks och argumenteras vara lika betydande som verbalt språk vid skapandet av relationer och subjekt i litteratur. Genom att applicera posthumanism, biologisk forskning och ett icke-antropocentriskt sätt att tänka kan man avveckla tanken om att människan är det enda subjekt som räknas, detta är något som enbart verifierats eftersom icke-mänskliga djur aldrig fått någon agens eller bekräftande att de har rätten till en röst. Vad händer i en roman när protagonisten saknar förmågan till verbalt språk, när det verbala språket är central som verkning i mänsklig exceptionalism?
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Williams, Gregory Alaric. "Posthuman Maturation in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae: Re-Conceptualizing the Human for Adolescence and Artificial Intelligence." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2017. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6774.
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In order to empower adolescents, this thesis examines how the adult conception of the human in humanism disempowers adolescents. This thesis examines this process in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae, a work of young adult science fiction with non-traditional text structures. In consequence of their disempowerment, the adolescent Kady and artificially intelligent AIDAN impersonate human authorities in order to gain control over their lives. When these attempts fail, Kady and AIDAN transition from a humanist conception of the human, as an isolated self that balances rationality and emotionality, to a posthuman conception of the human, a distributed self that accepts the hybridization of adolescent and machine. The development of a posthuman self enables adolescents and AI control over their own lives, an alternative form of maturation that suggests a means for empowering adolescents through the use of technology. This alternative maturation counters traditional maturation in young adult science fiction and anti-technology trends in young adult science fiction.
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Almerud, Eva-Kersti. "Gränsöverskridande i Olga Tokarczuks roman Styr din plog över de dödas ben." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Slaviska språk, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-167802.
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My aim with this essay was to write about bordercrossing and border changing in Olga Tokarczuk’s literary work with the main focus on her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. While writing I came to the conclusion that there are very many different sorts of border changing in the novel, for example borders between countries, borders between fiction and reality, indistinct borders, borders between identities and borders in time and space. However, one distinct bordercrossing, that I had not anticipated, emerged very clearly: the border changing when it comes to genre. Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead characterizes as a detective story, but the more you read the novel, the more you realize, that other themes might be more important than the puzzle. This book holds above all eco fiction and posthumanism. By crossing different borders Olga Tokarczuk has transformed an illusory detective story to a nuanced novel about human life on various levels and in different spaces, about human view on animals and about hunters’ disrespect for animals.
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Doyle, Emma B. B. "The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1559139514065567.
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Garcia, Rebecca Ann. "COMING OUT OF THE COFFIN AS THE POSTHUMAN: POSTHUMAN RHETORIC AND HARRIS’ SOOKIE STACKHOUSE SERIES." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/400.
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In this article, I argue that the vampires in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels illustrate clearly the posthuman self in its connection beyond itself to other vampires, humans, and non-humans. Learning to co-exist becomes problematic in Harris’ series, where we encounter a “new” representation of vampire. These vampires have come out of the coffin, and their revelation allows us to explore how they can be viewed in connection to the human world and how their transcendence can be seen as a move toward posthumanism, as its particular blend of body and community help demonstrate what the self expanded could be. As a species that differs from us “typical” humans and yet must co-exist with us and other non-humans, the posthuman provides a theoretical framework for how we can approach this new representation as a disembodied non-unitary subject. Through their transcendence from the world of the living to the life of the undead, these vampires let us see humanity as a distinct moment in evolution that is a continuous process, not a resolution. There are six areas where we see these common characteristics between posthumanism and Harris’ vampires. The first is the vampire being represented as an other. Like the posthuman, Harris’ vampires are juxtaposed against the human population and because vampires are marked as other this creates tension where they must co-exist with humans and yet still be examined from an anthropocentric perspective. Another way the posthuman allows us to interpret this fear of vampires is from the position of the de-centered human. Because humans prior to the “great revelation” in Harris’ fictional world, believed themselves to be what defined humanism versus their non-human others; they must shift in where they are located on the species podium due to vampires and that creates a fear. Another correlation is that of immortality; which is what vampires inherit when they become a member of the undead, but for the posthuman it is encoding and dematerialization that allows us to transcend these mortal bodies. This notion of disembodiment demonstrates the body being a rhetorical strategy to create an effect, such as manipulation. Since the body for the posthuman is seen as materiality and therefore they are not embedded to only exist within it, the vampire likewise is able to exploit the body in order to accomplish its purpose. Next for the posthuman, transcendence is the way they not only become immortal, but also how they move from identifying as individuals to identifying as part of a larger community. For the vampires in the Stackhouse series, their consciousness lies in their information and not in their material bodies, thus they are able to situate themselves within the larger network with other vampires, humans, and non-humans. And lastly the connection through the exchange of blood, which for the vampire is a literal connection, but for the posthuman is instead an ideal network which removes individuality.
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Rivera, Alexandra. "Human Monsters: Examining the Relationship Between the Posthuman Gothic and Gender in American Gothic Fiction." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1358.
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According to Michael Sean Bolton, the posthuman Gothic involves a fear of internal monsters that won't destroy humanity apocalyptically, but will instead redefine what it means to be human overall. These internal monsters reflect societal anxieties about the "other" gaining power and overtaking the current groups in power. The posthuman Gothic shows psychological horrors and transformations. Traditionally this genre has been used to theorize postmodern media and literary work by focusing on cyborgs and transhumanist medical advancements. However, the internal and psychological nature of posthumanism is fascinating and can more clearly manifest in a different Gothic setting, 1800s American Gothic Fiction. This subgenre of the Gothic melds well with the posthuman Gothic because unlike the Victorian Gothic, its supernatural entities are not literal; they are often figurative and symbolic, appearing through hallucinations. In this historical context, one can examine the dynamic in which the "human" is determined by a rational humanism that bases its human model on Western, white masculinity. Therefore, the other is clearly gendered and racialized. Margrit Shildrick offers an interesting analysis of the way women fit into this construction of the other because of their uncanniness and Gothic monstrosity. Three works of American Gothic fiction--George Lippard's The Quaker City, Edgar Allen Poe's "Ligeia," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" portray these gendered power dynamics present within the posthuman Gothic when applied to the American Gothic; the female characters are either forced by patriarchy into becoming monstrous, or they were never fully human in the first place.
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Chen, Jou-An. "Airship, Automaton, and Alchemy: A Steampunk Exploration of Young Adult Science Fiction." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Humanities, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/7423.
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Steampunk first appeared in the 1980s as a subgenre of science fiction, featuring anachronistic technologies with a veneer of Victorian sensibilities. In recent years steampunk has re-emerged in young adult science fiction as a fresh and dynamic subgenre, which includes titles such as The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross, The Hunchback Assignment by Arthur Slade, and Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. Like their predecessors, these modern steampunk novels for teens use retrofuturistic historiography and innovative mechanical aesthetics to dramatize the volatile relationship between man and technology, only in these novels the narrative is intentionally set in the context of their teen protagonist's social and emotional development. However, didactic conventions such as technophobia and the formulaic linearity of the bildungsroman narrative complicate and frustrate steampunk's representation of adolescent formation. Using case studies of Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld and The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia, retrofuturism and technological hybridity are presented as defining features of steampunk that subvert
young adult science fiction's technophobic and liberal humanist traditions. The dirigible and the automaton are examined as the quintessential tropes of steampunk fiction that reproduce the necessary amphibious quality, invoking new expressions and
understanding of adolescent growth and identity formation that have a distinctly utopian, nostalgic, and ecocentric undertone.
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Tiengo, A. "OVER THE BRINK OF ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE. POWER, RELIGION, AND NATURE IN MARGARET ATWOOD¿S MADDADDAM TRILOGY." Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2434/360628.
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Margaret Atwood’s writings have been the subject of many critical studies from different theoretical angles, which outline the diverse and composite quality of the Canadian author’s literary explorations. The publication of the MaddAddam trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) – have opened yet another critical perspective, which is that of science fiction or, as Atwood herself defines it, speculative fiction. Moving from the Canadian roots of Atwood’s speculative texts and from the debate with Ursula K. Le Guin on science fiction, this study employs the interpretative tools provided by ecocriticism and posthumanism to investigate Atwood’s trilogy as a single and accomplished body of work. In the second chapter, devoted to Oryx and Crake, I explore the developments of Atwood’s lifelong interest in the nature and politics of power, and I argue that she employs parody as a subverting strategy that questions roles and discourses involved in power relations. In the third chapter, I analyze The Year of the Flood as an investigation in the religious roots of culture, which represents a bulwark against the ruthless dreams – or nightmares – of scientific and technological progress. Lastly, I engage with the critical discourses on nature and on the environmental crisis, to attain the conclusion that, in MaddAddam, hybridity and a revived awareness of the power of narration represent a strategy of survival. Ultimately, my goal lies in analyzing Atwood’s aesthetic responses to the urgency of the environmental crisis, which rely on the tools of storytelling and on the playful use of language. At bottom, I argue that these tools serve as aesthetic responses to the threat of a dystopian future.
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Carter, Bryan. "Left behind : passing through African American literature to posthumanity /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3025609.
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Engström, Viktor. "”Jag kan inte tala” : Mellanrummet, det kollektiva och det inhumana i Willy Kyrklunds Solange." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-197164.
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Denna uppsats behandlar Willy Kyrklunds roman Solange (1951) utifrån några av de verktyg som utvecklats av Gilles Deleuze och Félix Guattari för att närma sig litteraturen. Som teoretisk utgångspunkt kommer jag huvudsakligen att använda mig av Deleuzes och Guattaris studie över Franz Kafka med titeln Kafka: För en mindre litteratur (1975), tillsammans med ett antal andra relevanta skrifter och verk. I Kafkastudien utvecklas begreppet om den mindre litteraturen, vilket i korthet kan beskrivas som ett särskilt förhållningssätt till en större, etablerad litteratur. Jag kommer även undersöka Solange utifrån begreppet om djur-blivandet, så som det presenteras i Deleuzes och Guattaris Tusen platåer (1980). Utifrån dessa verktyg kommer jag i första hand att undersöka den säregna användningen av aspekter som form, genre och berättande i Solange, med avsikten att visa hur romanen på olika plan omförhandlar litterära normer och konventioner till förmån för vad som kan sägas vara ett kollektivt utsägande.
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Njiru, Henry Muriithi. "Eco-Techno-Cosmopolitanism: Education, Inner Transformation and Practice in the Contemporary U.S. Eco-Disaster Novel." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1429560750.
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Törnsten, Emma. "Ett liv utan djur är ett liv utan gud : En människa-djur studie analys av Kerstin Ekmans Vargskinnstrilogi." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Litteraturvetenskap, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-45282.
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This essay applies human-animal studies in relation to the Swedish author Kerstin Ekman's books Guds barmhärtighet (1999), Sista Rompan (2002) and Skraplotter (2003) together called Vargskinnstrilogin. Kerstin Ekman's authorship is characterized by a coexistence between human, nature and animals where the stories entangle them into a dense complexity. As a reader, one is constantly reminded of this coexistence through Ekman's narrative approach as her stories contain many contact zones between humans and animals, which creates space for problematizing this entangled coexist from a posthumanistic perspective. The animals in the stories are at different distances to the human being based on their characteristics of being regarded as wild, domesticated or ferral. Based on these three categories, the wolf as a representative of the wild animals is analyzed in a theoretical context focusing on the function of different power structures within the anthropocentric paradigm. Ferral conditions are analyzed on the basis of, among other things, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theories of animal-becomings, escape lines and rhizom where the dog mainly exists when it is embodied in close interaction with humans in Ekman's stories. The domesticated animals are analyzed on the basis of the tension between rural and urban, where the progress of the civil society are rapidly changing during the 20th century which creates changed relations between people and agricultural animals.
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Kiraly, Thom. "An Angel Passes By : Posthuman and Acousmatic Voices in Digitally Mediated Contemporary Live Poetry." Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Sektionen för planering och mediedesign, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-4738.
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This paper is a comparative analysis between two digitally mediated live poetry performances: Frikativ by Jörg Piringer and This Loud by Amy X Neuburg. More specifically, I examine how these poets use digital technology in their live performances to challenge traditional notions of the human voice. My main argument is that their modes of exerting controlling over their voices ultimately serve similar purposes; those of establishing the voice as a relationship between speaker and listener, a phenomenon rather than a discreet object or bodily organ possible to observe on its own. This phenomenological point of view draws on Karen Barad’s concept of posthumanist performativity as well as on philosophical works on the voice, such as Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More. Moreover, I give an historical account of sound poetry, tape poetry and tape loops as they relate to Frikativ and This Loud. In this, I also discuss live-looping; a technique used by both Piringer and Neuburg and connect it to Gilles Deleuze's ideas of difference and repetition. Finally, Piringer's and Neuburg's works is compared based on how they attempt to control the voices-as-relations in their performances. My conclusion is that Frikativ constantly destabilizes the establishment and recognition of voice-as-relation. This Loud, due to the extensive and focused use of live-looping, does not destabilize as much as it multiplies the possible configurations of voices-as-relations.
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Christensen, Michelle Rae. "MONSTROUS FUTURES: QUEER-POSTHUMANITY IN TELEVISED HORROR." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1470441501.
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Trejling, Maria. "The Vulnerable Animals That Therefore We Are : (Non-)Human Animals in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-131606.
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Central to animal studies is the question of words and how they are used in relation to wordless beings such as non-human animals. This issue is addressed by the writer D.H. Lawrence, and the focus of this thesis is the linguistic vulnerability of humans and non-humans in his novel Women in Love, a subject that will be explored with the help of the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s text The Animal That Therefore I Am. The argument is that Women in Love illustrates the human subjection to and constitution in language, which both enables human thinking and restricts the human ability to think without words. This linguistic vulnerability causes a similar vulnerability in non-human animals in two ways. First, humans tend to imagine others, including non-verbal animals, through words, a medium they exist outside of and therefore cannot be defined through. Second, humans are often unperceptive of non-linguistic means of expression and they therefore do not discern what non-human animals may be trying to communicate to them, which often enables humans to justify abuse against non-humans. In addition, the novel shows how this shared but unequal vulnerability can sometimes be dissolved through the likewise shared but equal physical vulnerability of all animals if a human is able to imagine the experiences of a non-human animal through their shared embodiment rather than through human language. Hence the essay shows the importance of recognizing the limitations of language and of being aware of how the symbolizing effect of words influences the human treatment of its others.
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Welsh, Sasha. "Imagining what it means to be ''human'' through the fiction of J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K and Cormac McCarthy's The Road." University of the Western Cape, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/6205.
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Magister Artium - MAThrough a literary analysis of two contemporary novels, J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), in which a common concern seems to be an exploration of what it means to be human, the thesis seeks to explore the relationship between human consciousness and language. This dissertation considers the development of a conception of the human based on rationality, and which begins in the Italian Renaissance and gains momentum in the Enlightenment. This conception models the human as a stable knowable self. This is drawn in contrast to the novels, which figure the absence of a stable knowable self in the representation of their protagonists. The thesis thus interrogates language's capacity to provide definitional meanings of the ''human.'' On the other hand, although language's capacity to provide essential meanings is questioned, its abundant expressive forms give voice to the experience of human being. Drawing on a range of fields of enquiry, both philosophical, linguistic, and bio-ethical, this thesis seeks to explore the connection between human consciousness and the medium of language. It considers how the two novels in question play with the concept of language to produce or imagine other ways of thinking about human existence, and other ways of creating meaning to human existence through the representation of their novels.
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Israelson, Per. "Ecologies of the Imagination : Theorizing the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-142205.
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This book is about the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic. In it, the author argues that the definition of the fantastic presented by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970 can be used, provided it is first adapted to a media-ecological framework, to theorize the role of aesthetic participation in the creation of secondary worlds. Working within a hermeneutical tradition, Todorov understands reader participation as interpretation, in which the creative ambiguities of the literary object are primarily epistemological. However, it is here argued that the aesthetic object of the fantastic is also characterized by material ambiguity. The purpose of this dissertation is then to present a conceptual framework with which to theorize the relation between the material and the epistemological ambiguity of the fantastic. It is argued that such a framework can be found in an ecological understanding of aesthetic participation. This, in turn, entails understanding human subjectivity as a process always already embodied in a material environment. To this extent, the proposed theoretical framework questions the clear and oppositional distinction between form and matter, as well as that between mind and body, nature and culture, and human and non-human, on which a modern and humanist notion of subjectivity is based. And in this sense, the basic ecological assumptions of this dissertation are posthumanist, or non-humanist. From this position, it is argued that an ecological understanding of participation offers a means to reformulate the function of a number of concepts central to studying the aesthetics of the fantastic, most notably the concepts of media, genre and text. As the fantastic focuses on the creation of other worlds, it is an aesthetics of coming into being, of ontogenesis. Accordingly, it will be argued that the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic operationalizes the ontogenesis of media, genres and texts. By mapping the ontogenesis of three distinct media ecologies – the media ecology of fantasy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s secondary world Middle-earth; the media ecology of the American comic book superhero Miracleman; and the media ecology of William Blake – this book argues that the ecological imagination generates world. Per Israelson has been a doctoral candidate in the Research School of Studies in Cultural History at the department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Ecologies of the Imagination is his dissertation.
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Rice, Andrea. "Rebooting Brecht: Reimagining Epic Theatre for the 21st Century." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1555688903742283.
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Stenberg, Felicia. "Cooperative Apocalypse : Hostile Geological Forces in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-96839.
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In this thesis I explore the place of the human in the Anthropocene, and our relationship to the Earth through an analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. As the trilogy depicts an apocalyptic landscape where the Earth has sentience and humanity is divided into three subspecies, this work of speculative fiction lends itself well to be interrogated and examined as an allegory for our current climate crisis. The analysis is anchored in posthumanism and employs a variety of concepts, such as Bruno Latour’s work on agency and deanimation, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and Amitav Ghosh’s work on speculative fiction among others. I argue that The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates that the Earth is an agentive network that can no longer be ignored and contend that the trilogy complicates both anthropocentrism and individualism by depicting amplified versions of human beings, and in doing so highlights the arbitrary boundaries between both nature and society, and human and nonhuman. Thus, The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as a warning call for a future to be avoided at all costs, while concurrently be used to make sense of the incomprehensibility of our contemporary era.
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Rosquist, Rasmus. "Annihilating the Cartesian Divide : Finding the Inhuman in Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-169642.
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As posthumanist discourse attempts reposition the human as one of many subjects in relation to ecologies and other inhuman agencies, doing away with a Cartesian human exceptionalism is one of the key problems. From Haraway’s naturecultures, positing human culture as one of many, to Colebrook’s discussions of inhuman agencies, what ‘the human’ means to us is the heart of this theoretical field. In this paper I engage with theories within the discourse and posit them against a dialogue with Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, as well as with the ideas of George Bataille on how the human separated herself from other animals and in doing so created what we call Humanity. The aim is to find inhuman agencies and bring to light how they act upon the human, but also how perceiving the inhuman is, as Bataille writes, closed to us. What we find through a process and concept of annihilation of Humanity with the human, brought forth from a reading of the Biologist’s relation to the lighthouse and the tower in the novel, is that even though we may be able to perceive the inhuman, we might be always already anthropocentric in this perception. I suggest a reversal of Haraway’s term; culturenatures, as a way to understand this anthropocentric perception, in that just as our culture is borne from nature, other naturecultures are closed to us.
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Nyström, Filip. "Organet lever! : Kropp, ting och performativitet i Erik Beckmans roman Inlandsbanan (1967)." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-140700.
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The works of Erik Beckman (1935-1995) are quite unique within the Swedish literary scene. His texts convert the experimental language of the concretists of the sixties into a new form of fabulation that undermines our understanding of what literature can be, ranging from novels and poetry to theatre pieces and radio theatre. His literary style has been discussed by critics, but the depths of it are yet to be fully explored. There is a lot to gain from combining contemporary theories of materiality and corporeality with his self-proclaimed materialistic poetics. The novel Inlandsbanan (1967) is a fragmentary account of an inland train going through Sweden, with characters coming and going in a frustrating tempo. The text is filled with word games, narrative constructs and a language that brings forth the material aspects of communication that push the boundaries of literary interpretation. This thesis examines Beckman’s novel through the lens of theoretical concepts of thingliness and corporeality developed by the likes of Judith Butler, Karen Barad, and Andrew Pickering in order to elaborate an analysis that goes beyond the surface of its experimental and materialistic use of literary language. Using bodily themes, I analyze specific passages in the novel in order to find a new understanding of its semantic functions. By doing this through the concept of performativity, not only can I identify a thematized corporeality, but beyond that a literary form and a language that problematizes the very notion of the written text as a body and highlights a material agency in literature. This method enables an interpretation of the novel that can illuminates important aspects at play that previously have not been explored.
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(10688601), Sebastian Alexander Williams. "Parasitic Modernism: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature." Thesis, 2021.
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This dissertation argues that the unstable category of the parasite was used to debate the limits of humanism during the modernist period (approximately 1890 to 1945). I show how the most marginalized individuals and organisms are deemed “parasitic” and positioned at the core of social issues, such as tropical disease, poverty, and racism. Authors from Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen to John Steinbeck and George Orwell reveal how parasitism occupies a liminal space between categories of sickness/health, human/animal, and production/exploitation. This project contributes to developing debates in modernist studies about the relationship between nature and culture, and it builds on animal studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate that aesthetics shapes our evaluation of various forms of life.
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Yi, Dongshin. "A genealogy of cyborgothic: aesthetics and ethics in the age of posthumanism." 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1296.
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This dissertation considers the future convergence between gothic studies and
humanism in the age of posthumanism and proposes “cyborgothic” as a new literary
genre that heralds that future. The convergence under consideration is already in
progress in that an encounter between human and non-human consistently inspires the
two fields, questioning the nature of humans and the treatment of such non-human
beings as cyborgs. Such questioning, often conducted within the boundary of humanities,
persistently interprets non-human beings as either representing or helping human
shortcomings. Accordingly, answers are human-orientated or even human-centered in
many cases, and “cyborgothic,” generated out of retrospective investigation into gothic
studies and prospective formulation of posthumanism, aims to present different, nonanthropocentric
ways to view humans and non-humans on equal terms.
The retrospective investigation into gothic studies focuses on Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful to retrieve a gothic aesthetics of the beautiful, and in the second
chapter, examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein against Kant’s aesthetics to demonstrate
how this gothic aesthetics becomes obsolete in the tradition of the sublime. This
dissertation then addresses Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with Bruno Latour’s Science in
Action to reveal problems in fabricating scientific knowledge, especially focusing on
sacrifices made in the process. In the forth chapter, I examine Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith with William James’s pragmatism, and consider the question of how moral
complications inherent in science have been handled in American society. The last
chapter proposes Marge Piercy’s He, She and It as a same cyborgothic text, which tries
to develop a way to acknowledge the presence of the cyborg—one that is at once
aesthetical and ethical—so as to enable humans and cyborgs to relate each other on
equal terms. Thus, “cyborgothic” is being required as a literary attempt to present the
age of posthumanism that is no longer anthropocentric.
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Larsen, Amy Marie 1984. "Identification in Posthumanist Rhetoric: Trauma and Empathy." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/148204.
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Posthumanist rhetoric is informed by developments in the sciences and the humanities which suggest that mind and body are not distinct from each other and, therefore, claims of humans’ superiority over other animals based on cognitive differences may not be justified. Posthumanist rhetoric, then, seeks to re-imagine the human and its relationship to the world. Though “post-” implies after, like other “post-” terms, posthumanism also coexists with humanism. This dissertation develops a concept of posthumanist rhetoric as questioning humanist assumptions about subjectivity while remaining entangled in them.
The destabilization of the human subject means that new identifications between humans and nonhumans are possible, and the ethical implications of the rhetorical strategies used to build them have yet to be worked out. Identification, a key aim of rhetoric in the theory of Kenneth Burke and others, can persuade an audience to value others. However, it can also obscure the realities of who does and does not benefit from particular arguments, particularly when animal suffering is framed as human-like trauma with psychological and cultural as well as physical effects. I argue that a posthumanist practice of rhetoric demonstrates ways of circumventing this problem by persuading readers not only to care about others, but also to understand that our ability to comprehend another’s subjectivity is limited and that acknowledging these limitations is a method of caring.
his dissertation locates instances of resistance to and/or deployment of posthumanist critique in recent works of literature; identifies language commonly used in appeals that create identifications between humans and animals; and analyzes the implications of these rhetorical strategies. To that end, I have selected texts about human and animal suffering that engage particular themes of identification that recur in posthumanist rhetoric. The chapters pair texts that develop each theme differently. Most undermine human superiority as a species, but many reify the importance of certain qualities of the liberal humanist subject by granting them to nonhumans. The points of identification created between humans and nonhumans will inform how we re-imagine the human subject to account for our connections, and therefore our responsibilities, to other beings.
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"The Dirty Joke of Cyberpunk or the Humanism of Posthumanism in the Cyberpunk Tradition: Epigenetic Memory and Technology in Gibson's Neuromancer and Stephenson's Snow Crash." Master's thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.17778.
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abstract: What does it mean to be human or for that matter, posthuman, according to a cyberpunk? This paper navigates the experience of being human in the dystopian and highly technologized future worlds found within the cyberpunk literary tradition of the 1980s and early 1990s. This work explores the implication of what it means to be posthuman in these worlds, which are comprised of virtual realities and disembodied identities. This project first addresses posthumanism as a critical theory and its destabilization of the traditional concept of humanism with particular attention to the relationship between the human being and technology. After building a theoretical framework of posthumanism based on works by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler, this paper then offers a survey of the cyberpunk tradition and the key themes developed and examined within the genre. The project then investigates two seminal works of the cyberpunk movement, William Gibson's 1984 novel, Neuromancer, and Neal Stephenson's 1992 work, Snow Crash, in order to trace a becoming posthuman as it is found within cyberpunk. As this paper further explains, the process of uncovering the posthuman within these texts produces a sense of loss and also nostalgia for a previous experience of being human which was already posthuman. The cyberpunk tradition and these novels in particular, reveal that there has always already been a degree of indeterminacy surrounding the question of what it means to be human. Through destabilizing traditionally held conceptions of humanism, cyberpunk and posthumanism offer the potential to rethink ourselves and our comportment towards the world knowing that technology always already informs our experience of being human.Dissertation/Thesis
M.A. English 2013
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Song, Ho Rim. "Complex Feedback Loops of Technoscience, Literature, and Culture: Dynamics of the Complexity Paradigm in Scientific Fiction." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-08-8551.
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This dissertation explores the emergence of the complexity paradigm in our technoscience culture and proposes "scientific fiction" as a genre of cultural studies based on that paradigm. Throughout this dissertation, I use the terms and concepts of complexity theory developed by new science, which revises the reductionism and linearity of classic science. The complexity paradigm signifies a system of all knowledge that conceives the productivity and creativity of the complexity created by interconnective and interactive dynamics among and within systems. As a literary response to the complexity paradigm, scientific fiction emphasizes the productivity and creativity of the complexity, offering the possibility of the human‘s co-evolution with technoscience. These characteristics of scientific fiction help articulate new ontological, ethical, and aesthetic visions for the posthuman. This dissertation ultimately highlights the strong feedback loops of technoscience, literature, and culture, which promote the complexity paradigm. By comparing Pat Cadigan‘s Synners as a scientific fiction novel and William Gibson‘s Neuromancer as a representative postmodern science fiction novel, Chapter II presents the defining characteristics of scientific fiction, reconfiguring humanity in relation to the technoscience environment. Furthermore, analyzing Greg Bear‘s Blood Music, the chapter claims that the human subject is an adaptive, self-organizing, interconnective system. Grounded in such understandings of humanity and subjectivity, the next chapter examines Marge Piercy‘s He, She and It to offer a new ethical perspective, or the complexity ethics, which establishes the interconnective and interactive relationship between the human and the technological as an evolutionary partner. The complexity ethics describes human behaviors and thoughts in our technoscience culture rather than prescribing a moral guideline. Next, in investigating Shelley Jackson‘s Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel that rewrites Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, Chapter IV explores a new aesthetics appreciating the creativity of the complexity produced by interconnective and interactive dynamics. Finally, through the analyses of the scientific fiction novels, this dissertation suggests that scientific fiction is a transdisciplinary field that can offer new cultural visions.
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"Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the Reinvention of African American Culture." Doctoral diss., 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.45002.
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abstract: Modern and contemporary African American writers employ science fiction in order to recast ideas on past, present, and future black culture. This dissertation examines Afrofuturism’s cultural aesthetics, which appropriate devices from science fiction and fantasy in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events insufficiently treated by literary realism. The dissertation includes treatments of George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chicana/ofuturism.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation English 2017
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Favreau, Alyssa. "Galactic ecofeminism and posthuman transcendence : the tentative utopias of Octavia E. Butler's Lilith's Brood." Thèse, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/21252.
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Hortle, LJ. "Reading the posthuman : contemporary fiction and critical theory." Thesis, 2017. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23787/1/Hortle_whole_thesis.pdf.
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Representations of the posthuman in contemporary novels are of great cultural and political significance because of their capacity to expose and challenge attitudes to structures of human privilege and ideas of the future organised around the normative human subject. As a privileged site for the cultural construction of human identity, the novel is an ideal domain not only for examining those depictions of the human but also for breaking them apart. Through analysing the representation of the posthuman in contemporary novels, this thesis seeks to provide a clearer and more critical understanding of the human in novels at the start of the twenty-first century, and the role of fiction in both perpetuating and conspiring against dominant ideas of the human.
The thesis mobilises recent theoretical debates about the posthuman and posthumanism as a conceptual framework to investigate the status of the posthuman in fiction. It then offers close readings of how five early twenty-first-century novels imagine the human differently, including Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007).
The posthuman has traditionally been shoehorned into a question for theory and, specifically, the critical framework of posthumanism. Posthumanist scholarship has often overlooked the posthuman’s proliferation in fiction and, in particular, how significant literary novels of the early twenty-first century have unsettled normative ideas of the human. Indeed, the central argument of this thesis is that the cultural and political “work” of the posthuman and posthumanism is carried out by both literature and theory. The thesis defends the position that reading novels is imperative to establishing a critical politics of the human, and argues that novels about the posthuman intervene in posthumanism’s theoretical project. In telling stories of radically decentred human subjectivity, these novels dramatise their own critique of the human and its ensconced position of privilege within the Western cultural imagination.
Detailed textual analysis of the posthuman in contemporary literature illustrates the complexities and contradictions underlying culture’s attempts to rework the traditional human subject. In particular, this thesis analyses the persistent depiction of the posthuman as a queer figure in the selected novels and more broadly. In these queer manifestations, the posthuman is militant in its disruption of any normative sense of the human and its future. A reading of Never Let Me Go discusses language’s regulation of the posthuman and normative sexuality’s purchase on the human. An examination of Under the Skin considers the posthuman as a nexus of anxieties about anomalous bodies, sexuality and consumption practices. Analyses of Oryx and Crake and The Stone Gods demonstrate the posthuman’s significance to fictional thought experiments of human extinction, the Anthropocene and human reproductive futures. Finally, a chapter on Cloud Atlas addresses the failure of the posthuman to usher in any final dismantling of the human as the underlying term of Western culture and politics. These analyses emphasise that the posthuman imagination exists in a state of tension with a revivified and normative human exceptionalism, which surreptitiously re-enters posthuman fictions to restabilise narratives upon reassuring human scales.
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Koza, Michał. "Troska, podmiot, nomadyczność : dyskursy etyczne literatury polskiej po 1989 roku." Praca doktorska, 2020. https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/269521.
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Kleinhans, Belinda. "Mit Texttieren jenseits der Grenze des Schweigens sprechen. Sprachkrise, Machtdiskurse und eine Poetologie des Offenen in der deutschsprachigen Nachkriegsliteratur am Beispiel Wolfdietrich Schnurres, Guenter Eichs und Ilse Aichingers." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/7714.
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In this dissertation I analyze how the postwar German writers Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Günter Eich, and Ilse Aichinger negotiate anthropocentric and speciesist discourses via animal figures by drawing on such posthumanist thinkers as Derrida, Agamben, and Deleuze & Guattari. The literary texts question a world view and discourse organized around the establishment of power that utilizes animal metaphors to turn living beings into objects (and could thus be called “carno-phallogocentric”). They thus react to the strict hierarchy of (gendered) man over animal and respond - in the aftermath of the Second World War – by highlighting instead the similarities between man and animal, such as creaturely existence and shared trauma.
The analysis is guided by questions such as: How do the literary texts reflect and subvert the power discourses which surround man and animal? What is the role of language in this context? How does the animal, which is usually assumed to be mute, relate to the categories that are established in language? Does its place outside of language grant it capabilities the human cannot realize? Can the literary encounter between man and animal establish a space of the “Open” in which language can be re-evaluated and, after World War II, be saved? Is there a unique “animal poetology” which correlates to post-anthropocentric conceptions of the human?
Because these writers disorient the reader’s perception of reality via figures of the animal, i.e., animals as both metaphors and as subjects, I develop what I would like to call an “animal poetology” that is unique to them. This animal poetology, which redefines Agamben’s concept of the open by giving it a postwar, language-critical dimension, includes a thorough critique of human language with regard to power structures and a speciesist language which, during the early 20th century, was a vehicle for ideology and discrimination. The encounter with the animal leads the human being to reflect on the limits of language and thus enables the establishment of a mode of being in which the encounter with the other – beyond a space of judgement and hierarchies –is once again possible.
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"Cuerpo y universo: acercamientos poshumanistas a la materialidad en la poesía de Cristina Peri Rossi y Cecilia Vicuña." Master's thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.17983.
Full textAbstract:
abstract: Since the Enlightenment, humanist philosophy has understood materiality as an inert and determinate world categorically separate from the sphere of consciousness and language. However, after evolving significantly during the 20th century, the natural sciences now recognize the complexity, indeterminacy and agency of matter. A parallel transformation can be observed in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature and is exemplified in the works of Cristina Peri Rossi and Cecilia Vicuña. Drawing on knowledge which emerges from the natural sciences, the humanities and personal experience, these poets explore multiple dimensions of materiality from the microscopic world of subatomic particles and DNA molecules to the macroscopic world of the body and the structure of the universe. The theoretical orientation of this study emerges from posthumanism, which critiques the epistemological foundations of humanist thought and reconfigures reductionist concepts of matter, discourse, the subject, and agency which are grounded in dualistic ontology. Material feminist theorists explore materiality through interdisciplinary approaches which establish a dialogue between posthumanism, feminist theory and the natural sciences. The material feminist Karen Barad proposes an agential realist ontology which constitutes the principal theoretical framework of this thesis. According to Barad, phenomena are not exclusively social or material but rather material-discursive practices, and the concept of agency is reconfigured as the product of the dynamics of intra-action rather than an as an attribute restricted to the human sphere. Furthermore, this thesis utilizes diverse materials from the areas of literary criticism and scientific research in order to achieve an authentically interdisciplinary interpretation of materiality in the poetry. Peri Rossi and Vicuña express a profound questioning of the fundamental assumptions of humanism and offer perspectives which take into account matter's agency and dynamism. Their poetry presents materiality as a constant process of creation and as an active participant in the unfolding of reality, thereby opening up new horizons of investigation. By interpreting the works of Peri Rossi and Vicuña through the lens of posthumanist theory, this study contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature.Dissertation/Thesis
M.A. Spanish 2013
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Carstens, Johannes Petrus. "Techno genetrix : shamanizing the new flesh : cyborgs, virtual interfaces and the vegetable matrix in SF." Diss., 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/2126.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines the figures of the shaman and the cyborg, arguing that both act as intermediaries between the organic world of bodies and the artificial world of culture and machines. Using the sf of Robert Holdstock, David Zindell and Kathleen Ann Goonan as starting points, new forms of embodiment in the context of the cyborg and the shaman's shared narrative of radical boundary dissolution are critically and imaginatively examined. Throughout this thesis, the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Sadie Plant, Manuel De Landa, Erik Davis, Donna Haraway, Terence McKenna, and other speculative theorists who operate at the nexus of technological culture and the shamanic imagination serve as guidelines.English Studies
M.A.
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Botha, Tanja. "Van kubermens tot kuborg: representasies van mens-masjienverhoudinge in die Afrikaanse poesie (1990-2012)." Diss., 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/22688.
Full textAbstract:
In hierdie studie word die manifestasies en ontwikkelings van mens-masjien-verhoudinge in die Afrikaanse poësie vanaf 1990 tot 2012 ondersoek. Relevante uitgangspunte van die fenomenologie, posthumanisme en transhumanisme dien as teoretiese begronding om die gekompliseerde en gevarieerde aard van mens-masjien-verhoudinge in die Afrikaanse poësie te bestudeer. Die studie beoog om deur kwantitatiewe data-analise die manifestasie van tegnologiese terme en verwysings na tegnologiese objekte in Afrikaanse poësie vanaf 1990 tot 2012 te karteer. Hierbenewens word deeglike kwalitatiewe ondersoek gedoen na die verskillende representasies van mens-masjien-verhoudinge in geselekteerde Afrikaanse gedigte. Laastens word rolle en metaforiese betekenisse van digitale tegnologie in posthumane subjekte se belewing op drie tematiese vlakke ondersoek, naamlik liefde en seks, spiritualiteit en die dood.In this study the different manifestations of human-machine relationships in Afrikaans poetry between 1990 and 2012 are investigated. Relevant viewpoints from the phenomenology, posthumanism and transhumanism form part of the theoretical framework in which the often complicated and varied nature of human-machine relationships are studied. It is the goal of this study to map the manifestations of technological terms and references to technological objects in Afrikaans poetry from 1990 to 2012, utilising quantitative data analysis. Furthermore, the in-depth qualitative analysis will investigate various representations of human-machine relationships in selected Afrikaans poems. The roles and metaphorical meanings of digital technology within the experiences of posthuman subjects are investigated on three thematic levels, namely love and sex, spirituality and death.
Afrikaans and Theory of Literature
M. A. (Afrikaans)