Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture: 1st Edition (Hardback)

1st Edition

Edited by Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Essi Varis

Routledge

386 pages

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Description
Contents
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Description

The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture – although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well.

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman, and Posthuman: Striving for More Ethical Cohabitation

Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisi Koistinen, Karoliina Lummaa, and Essi Varis

Part 1. Towards Posthumanist Literature and Posthumanist Reading

1 On the Possibility of a Posthuman/ist Literature(s)

Carole Guesse

2 Posthumanist Reading: Witnessing Ghosts, Summoning Nonhuman Powers

Karoliina Lummaa

3 Becoming-instrument: Thinking with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects

Kaisa Kortekallio

Part 2. 　Imagining Aliens and Monsters

4 Alien Overtures: Speculating about Nonhuman Experiences with Comic Book Characters

Essi Varis

5 Playing the Nonhuman: Alien Experiences in Aliens vs. Predator

Jonne Arjoranta

6 Wild Things Squeezed in the Closet: Monsters of Children’s Literature as Nonhuman Others

Marleena Mustola and Sanna Karkulehto

Part 3. Becoming with Animals

7 Dead Dog Talking: Posthumous, Preposthumous, and Preposterous Canine Narration in Charles Siebert’s Angus

Mikko Keskinen

8 Carnivorous Anatomies: Art and Being Beasts

Brad Bolman

9 Reconfiguring Human and Nonhuman Animals in a Guiding Assemblage: Towards Posthumanist Conception of Disability

Hana Porkertová

Part 4. Technological (Co-)Agencies

10 Meeting the Machine Halfway: Towards Non-Anthropocentric Semiotics

Cléo Collomb and Samuel Goyet

11 Journeys in Intensity: Human and Nonhuman Co-Agency, Neuropower, and Counterplay in Minecraft

Marleena Huuhka

12 Cyborganic Wearables: Sociotechnical Misbehavior and the Evolution of Nonhuman Agency

Patricia Flanagan and Raune Frankjær

Part 5. Afterword: Unnarratable Matter?

13 Unnarratable Matter: Emergence, Narrative, and Material Ecocriticism

Juha Raipola

About the Editors

Sanna Karkulehto is Professor of Literature at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has published books, articles and book chapters on the critical study of representation, the politics of discourse, and the politics of difference. Her latest co-edited anthology offers theorization on the ethics and politics of reading when studying representations of gender and violence.

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (PhD, contemporary culture studies) currently works as postdoctoral researcher in contemporary culture studies at the University of Jyväskylä. Her research interests include feminist theory, posthumanism, crime fiction and speculative fiction, transmediality, and monster studies.

Essi Varis is a graduate student in Comparative Literature and Comics at the University of Jyväskylä. She defended her doctoral compilation dissertation Graphic Human Experiments: Frankensteinian Cognitive Logics of Characters in Vertigo Comics and Beyond in April of 2019.

About the Series

Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture

In recent years, many disciplines within the humanities have become increasingly concerned with non-human actors and entities. The environment, animals, machines, objects, weather, and other non-human beings and things have taken center stage to challenge assumptions about what we have traditionally called "the human."　Informed by theoretical approaches like posthumanism, the new materialisms, (including Actor Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and similar approaches) ecocriticism, and critical animal studies, such scholarship has until now had no separate and identifiable collective home at an academic press. This series will provide that home, publishing work that shares a concern with the non-human in literary and cultural studies. The series invites single-authored books and essay collections that focus primarily on literary texts, but from an interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed perspective; it will include work that crosses geographical and period boundaries. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.

Learn more…