SoSe 22: PS-Surveying English Literatures: Literature and the Posthuman
Justus Conrad Gronau
Comments
The ‘posthuman’, both as an adjective and as a noun, does not only designate a time ‘after’ the human, but also a ‘before’ or a ‘beyond’. The related theories and philosophies gathered under the umbrella term ‘posthumanism’ question the notion of the stable, autonomous, humanist subject and transform the concept of the human being as emergent by bringing into consideration the ubiquity of technological relations and prostheses, cybernetics and the cyborg, robotics, information theory, non-anthropocentric world views, just to mention a few.
This seminar discusses how the posthuman is negotiated in literary texts. How does the human being relate to the posthuman? What does it mean to be a (post)human? What are the aesthetic strategies employed if a narrator is no longer human? What is the epistemology of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)? Which moral and ethical questions are raised in the posthuman condition? Next to a selection of introductory theoretical and literary texts – the posthuman might have appeared long before the advent of robots and what is called ‘science fiction’ –, this seminar will discuss two contemporary novels which feature posthuman themes. Ian McEwan’s Machines like Me and People like You (2019) revolves around the topics of a computerised dystopian contrafactual society in Britain, a robot called ‘Adam’, consciousness, artificial intelligence, as well as ensuing questions in ethics and morals. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021) is told from the perspective of an Artificial Friend (A.F.) exploring the ‘big questions’ such as what it means to be a human, what it means to love, and what it means to understand and know the world.
Course material will be provided on Blackboard. Please obtain the following editions:
- McEwan, Ian. Machines like Me and People like You. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019.ISBN: 978-1-78733-167-9.
- Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. London: Faber, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-571-36488-6.
14 Class schedule
Regular appointments