Toward a Posthumanist Sublime in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

The sublime is a scale relationship between humans and powerful nonhuman nature. In this brief reflection on Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, I consider how Austen carefully approached the sublime in her description of the wildness of nature at Lyme Regis, where humans (her characters) and the nonhuman nature meet, within the context of the Anthropocene. Whereas modern humanist conceptualizations of ‘the sublime’ privilege human reason and culture as triumphant forces of transcendence over a violent terrifying nature (see, for example, Kant; Burke), I argue that Austen’s writing in Persuasion (1817) anticipates a posthumanist form of the sublime that attends to an inseparable “naturalcultural” (Barad 2007, 91) or human nonhuman practices. This form of posthumanism, as explained by Ferrando (2013), rethinks “the representationalist [sic] and constructivist radicalizations of late postmodernity, which ... lost track of the material realm” (30)

Aesthetics · Anthropocene · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Humanism · Persuasion · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Postmodernism · Postmodernity · Realm · Sublime · Wildness · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Ecology

• Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness

  K Barad•New Formations•2017

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