Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20074973
AutoresLouise Westling (0000-0002-0544-4861, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Páginas25-47
Fecha de publicación2006-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaNature in Literary and Cultural Studies (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/9789401203555_003
OpenAlexW3191495701
ISBN9789401203555
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12

Recent theoretical emphasis on ‘the posthuman’ radically destabilises humanist pretensions to superiority over other forms of life and the illusion of human separation from the rest of nature which have haunted ecocriticism since its origins a little over a decade ago, and Western thought since Plato. After a brief history of ecocriticism, this essay describes twentieth-century philosophy’s efforts to break down humanist dualisms, in parallel with the discoveries of physics that show the relativism and interrelationship of observer and phenomena observed. John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are presented as the two modern philosophers whose work embraces the implications of evolutionary biology and quantum physics, to turn towards genuinely ecological perspectives upon the human place in the world. Their work prepared the way for posthumanist theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe, who now begin to explore the deep ecological relationships between homo sapiens and the larger community of earth’s life. Merleau-Ponty defines language and literature as growing out of what we humans see as “silence” in the world around us, but which is actually a landscape overrun with words. Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, is discussed as an example of literary performance of this ecological vision of literature’s chiasmic participation in the communal conversation, or singing, of the planet’s web of life

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Humanism · Literature · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Silence · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy