Routledge
386 pages
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
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.