WiSe 21/22: MÜ-Constr.Difference:Liter.+Cult.Hist.: Posthuman Modernities
Jennifer Wawrzinek
Information for students
Comments
In the history of English literatures, the figure of the human has often been used to uphold ideas of moral progress and social equality intrinsic to the notion of ‘human rights’. This construction of the human, despite its political aims of equality, has nevertheless served to consolidate the power of some members of society against others by figuring those that are reasoning and thus ‘rational’ as superior. At the end of the twentieth century, however, there emerged a stream of thought with its roots in feminist criticism, science studies, and cultural theory, that aimed to reconsider the role of the body as a means of constructing alternative ontologies and epistemologies, thus destabilising or deconstructing the divisions between mind and body, human and nonhuman. These theories aim at reconstructing the hierarchies that uphold various systems of oppression by transforming them into relational networks of knowing and being.
Over the course of the semester, students will read a range of theoretical texts from writers working within the disciplines of posthumanism and new materialism, in addition to novels and poetry by writers working with figures of the posthuman, in order to examine the ways in which these thinkers and writers aim to move beyond the constructivist-essentialist impasse as a means of accounting for co-constitutive intra-actions between meaning and matter. Students will be asked to consider how the posthuman refigures ideas of epistemology and ontology, forms of relationality, and difference itself. We will ask what happens to the subject, and, importantly, to the claims of politics (Marxist, postcolonial, or feminist), once the conventional divisions that underwrite identities are complicated within the posthuman paradigm.
A course reader will be made available on Moodle at the beginning of the semester.
In addition, students are expected to acquire the following set texts:
- Berger, John. King.
- Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red.
- Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo's Hound.
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments