Posthuman/ist Literature? Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Zero K
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18965307 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stefan Herbrechter (0000-0003-0094-0740, Heidelberg University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2020-10-07 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Open Library of Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2056-6700 • E-ISSN: 2056-6700 |
| Publisher | Open Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.16995/olh.592 |
| OpenAlex | W3091962715 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 10 |
Posthumanist literature—question mark. The question mark in the title gestures towards the conundrum that something like posthumanist literature might well be a contradiction in terms. This essay discusses the connection between posthumanism, the posthuman, and posthumanisation, on the one hand, and literature, the literary and post-literary (or the survival of literature), on the other hand. It differentiates between a literature of the posthuman and posthumanist literature. Through a close reading of some contemporary examples it shows that literature can follow a number of paths to engage with posthumanism (as a discourse) and the posthuman (as a figure) and thus respond to the ongoing (social, technological, ecological...) process of posthumanisation. Thematically, posthuman/ist literature is concerned with a variety of topics that are associated with figurations of the posthuman: climate change, artificial intelligence, androids and robots, the Anthropocene, enhancement, postanthropocentrism, the question of the animal, object ontology, cyborgisation and dis/embodiment, non/human futures, to name just the most obvious. Stylistically, however, a posthumanist literature will have to display a level of self-reflexion that problematizes the very idea of the literary as a practice and of literature as an (eminently humanist) institution. Whether examples of posthumanist literature – in this strong, ‘literal’, stylistic sense – can actually exist is explored through a reading of Don Delillo’s Point Omega and Zero K
Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Humanism · Linguistics · Literature · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Reading (process) · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
| Citations per year | 0.6 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2023 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |