Literature and posthumanism

Abstract

Poetry, fiction, and the language of the theatre make for powerful articulations of the imaginary’s engagement with what it means to be human. Critical posthumanist scholarship has been attentive to this tradition, often looking to literature for representations of different figures of the posthuman. This chapter considers critical posthumanism’s readiness to maintain literary reference as a staple of posthumanist theory, and asks to what extent this remains urgent in the context of post-print and post-literary culture and among immanent challenges to the assumptions underwriting human “meaning.” Linked to this is literature’s capacity to read posthumanism back. The suggestion is that literature’s affording of ideas and situations for posthumanism to think with appears undimmed, not least because its forms and modalities have themselves evolved, and not necessarily more slowly than posthumanism’s own transformations. Thinking about literature’s evolving relation to, and relating of, the posthuman, it emerges, therefore provides cause not so much for critical inattention to literature, as motivation for critique’s reattachment to literature’s becomings. In that reattachment critical posthumanism has its own part to play, and one that can redefine it in turn.