Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory

Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory PDF Author: Karen Raber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category "human†? is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism. Karen Raber, a leading scholar in the field, clearly and cogently guides the reader through complex theoretical terrain, providing fresh, exciting readings of plays including Othello, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida and Henry IV Part 1.

Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory

Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory PDF Author: Karen Raber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category "human†? is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism. Karen Raber, a leading scholar in the field, clearly and cogently guides the reader through complex theoretical terrain, providing fresh, exciting readings of plays including Othello, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida and Henry IV Part 1.

Posthumanist Shakespeares

Posthumanist Shakespeares PDF Author: S. Herbrechter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137033592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Shakespeare scholars and cultural theorists critically investigate the relationship between early modern culture and contemporary political and technological changes concerning the idea of the 'human.' The volume covers the tragedies King Lear and Hamlet in particular, but also provides posthumanist readings of other Shakespearean plays.

Antebellum Posthuman

Antebellum Posthuman PDF Author: Cristin Ellis
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823278468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
From the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” to the Civil Rights-era declaration “I AM a Man,” antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of black humanity. It has done so, however, even as the very definition of the human has been called into question by the biological sciences. While this conflict between liberal humanism and biological materialism animates debates in posthumanism and critical race studies today, Antebellum Posthuman argues that it first emerged as a key question in the antebellum era. In a moment in which the authority of science was increasingly invoked to defend slavery and other racist policies, abolitionist arguments underwent a profound shift, producing a new, materialist strain of antislavery. Engaging the works of Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman, and Dickinson, Cristin Ellis identifies and traces the emergence of an antislavery materialism in mid-nineteenth century American literature, placing race at the center of the history of posthumanist thought. Turning to contemporary debates now unfolding between posthumanist and critical race theorists, Ellis demonstrates how this antebellum posthumanism highlights the difficulty of reconciling materialist ontologies of the human with the project of social justice.

Posthumanism

Posthumanism PDF Author: Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780936222
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
What does it mean to be human today? The answer to this question, which is as old as the human species itself, is becoming less and less certain. Current technological developments increasingly erode our traditional humanist reflexes: consciousness, emotion, language, intelligence, morality, humour, mortality - all these no longer demonstrate the unique character and value of human existence. Instead, the spectre of the 'posthuman' is now being widely invoked as the 'inevitable' next evolutionary stage that humans are facing. Who comes after the human? This is the question that posthumanists are taking as their starting point. This critical introduction understands posthumanism as a discourse, which, in principle, includes everything that has been and is being said about the figure of the 'posthuman'. It outlines the genealogy of the various posthuman 'scenarios' in circulation and engages with their theoretical and philosophical assumptions and social and political implications. It does so by connecting the philosophical debate about the future of humanity with a range of texts, including examples from new media, popular culture, science and the media.

Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America

Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America PDF Author: Edward King
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911576453
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4

What Is Posthumanism?

What Is Posthumanism? PDF Author: Cary Wolfe
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942714
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities—posthumanities—respond to the redefinition of humanity’s place in the world by both the technological and the biological or “green” continuum in which the “human” is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe—one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory—ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin’s writings, Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.

Renaissance Posthumanism

Renaissance Posthumanism PDF Author: Joseph Campana
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823269574
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of “critical posthumanisms” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today’s “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if “the human” is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny “contemporary”—and ally—of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.

The Accommodated Animal

The Accommodated Animal PDF Author: Laurie Shannon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

Posthuman Lear

Posthuman Lear PDF Author: Craig Dionne
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 0692641572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Be sure to fasten your seatbelts while reading Craig Dionne's POSTHUMAN LEAR. In addition to being a wild ride through time and space, hurtling from late antiquity to post-Fukushima-radiated Japan by way of Shakespeare's motley crew of castaways on a storm-battered heath, the book also offers a reparative salve for our troubled anthropocene. As long as we speak what we feel, and reversing Edgar's famous line, even what we *ought* to say, with the shards and broken fragments of borrowed proverbial speech, we will at least have shelter with each other and with a newly denuded world, and in a consoling if partly ruined human language, from the coming Winter. Eileen JoyCraig Dionne has written Shakespearean criticism as it should be written: theoretically sophisticated, historically situated, while tied to the present moment, and thoroughly engaging as a piece of writing. Posthuman Lear will change the way you think ... about Lear and about the work we do. Sharon O'DairApproaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare's tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being - from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one's interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare's tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear's progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.At the center of Dionne's analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within 'adagential' being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.Dionne's reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare's central existential questions - the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world - in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne's final appeal is to "repurpose" our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster.

Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory

Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory PDF Author: Neema Parvini
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147424100X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.