The Modernist Corpse

What happens when an emergent theoretical or critical approach stops being oppositional and becomes a dominant position in its own right? This is perhaps the status of posthumanism in the present conjuncture. Originally emerging as an oppositional position in the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, posthumanism now finds itself, ten more years into the century, one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies in the present. No longer a challenge to the common sense of postmodernism and social construction, it now has articulated its own version of materialist and ontological common sense.What was once a challenge to doxa starts to feel like the workings of doxa itself, a set of theoretical moves that now begin to verge on the routine. It is unsurprising, then, that our own present moment has seen the emergence of a number of critiques of posthumanist doxa, often from the very same theoretical approaches that posthumanism tried to supplant. Similarly, this decade has witnessed a number of works of literary criticism that take posthumanism as established enough to produce an ever-growing archive of literary criticism.The books under review here are examples of such criticism, and if they are any indication, posthumanism—far from fully settled—can still be generative and protean. Each of these books demonstrates what powerful insights a posthumanist approach to literary studies and cultural production can yield. These books also are not starry-eyed about the posthumanist project but are balanced in their assessment of what it can offer and with what it needs to be supplemented in order to be fully persuasive.Take, for example, Erin E. Edwards’s The Modernist Corpse, which explores a ubiquitous yet undertheorized aspect of the posthuman: “the corpse and the larger ecology in which it is embedded” (100). Drawing on a now-familiar mix of Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, Edwards’s text provides rich and original readings of the engagement with death in a range of modernist texts, from the different corpses that animate William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), to the specter of lynching and its relationship to specular forms of power manifested in what she terms “autopsy-optics” (77) as they are figured in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s photographs of African American life for the 1900 Paris Exposition, to Djuna Barnes’s vision of an affirmatively queer and deathly love in Nightwood (1936), to a beautifully theorized account of sound technology and its relationship to modernist poetry (77). Mixing a careful attention to modernist aesthetics and a historicist approach to the subject of death in the early twentieth century, the book makes a persuasive claim for death’s centrality to modernism, not only in relationship to the mass and serialized deaths produced by world war but also as a preoccupation of modernist aesthetics itself. While Edwards’s historicist frame is reasonably persuasive, it is in its dazzling close readings of much-picked-over texts that the book is most powerful. Indeed, The Modernist Corpse recalls the best high-theoretical work of modernist studies before the emergence of the democratizing and historicizing imperatives grouped under the banner of the new modernist studies. While the book nicely engages questions of race, gender, and sexuality (although class and economics are notably absent from all the texts under review here), it is here that the book’s Deleuzian framework, which tends to emphasize death as merely another becoming, shows some of its limits. If death is merely another becoming, then how do we assess its political and ethical import?Such an attention to matters political and ethical is what distinguishes Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman. Whereas Edwards’s historicist frame feels persuasive but finally contingent on her larger project, Ellis’s is a thoroughgoing historicist approach. Beginning with the antinomy between posthumanist valorizations of the nonhuman and accounts of the dehumanization of the nonwhite and non-Western in critical race theory, Ellis returns to an understudied dynamic in three canonical US authors of the nineteenth century. She explores the turn to biological and materialist thought in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. These writers engaged with various forms of biological discourse seemingly at odds with the liberal and emancipatory discourses with which they are associated: “And yet, . . . these authors’ materialism is also illiberal, so thoroughly corrosive to the fiction of the autonomous individuality that it obliges us to rethink the tenets of liberalism (including individual rights, freedom, and equality) at very basic levels” (18). This turn to the biological was, in part, a response to the rise of scientific racism and various forms of biologism in the midcentury moment. It was an attempt to subvert such exclusionary biologisms by homeopathic incorporation and a push against the limitations of liberal discourse itself. The ambiguity of this move is captured in Ellis’s use of the word illiberal. Illiberalism can either be liberationist, pushing beyond the platitudes, exclusions, and merely formal equalities of liberal discourse, or it can be frighteningly reactionary, using biological and ontological claims to naturalize cultural hierarchies and exclusions. Antebellum Posthuman thus speaks with special force to our own illiberal moment; Ellis makes this connection explicit with her penultimate chapter, “Race and Materiality in the Twenty-First Century.” Alternating between the aporias that structure theories of race and those that structure theories of materiality in the present moment, Ellis demonstrates that the two can and must speak to each other. The chapter should be required reading for scholars engaging in either of these areas.As strong as Ellis’s book is, David Herman’s book is at least its equal. Indeed, Herman’s application of narrative theory to posthumanism, specifically to contemporary work in animal studies, is nothing short of revelatory. On the face of it, narrative theory and animal studies seem to be an uncomfortable fit. Narrative is too bound to the human. Even more than language (the humanness of which animal theorists have nicely complicated), narrative seems to be anthropocentric. Animality is typically posited as radically nonnarrative. Yet Herman’s book reveals the lie in all these assumptions, not by simply grafting narrative theory onto nonhuman animals but by radically reconceptualizing the affordances of narrative in relationship to the nonnarrative. The version of narratology that Herman posits radically rearticulates narrative’s scope. He articulates a realist theory of narrative in which the constructivist principles of structuralist narratology have been jettisoned or at least ameliorated by a recognition of how narrative interacts with nonnarrative entities, environments, and forms of knowledge. As Herman argues, narratives may be human produced, but they are not reducible to the anthropocentric: “my working assumption is that the chief task of a narratology beyond the human is to map out the dialectical interplay between anthropocentric and biocentric storytelling traditions” (7). These storytelling traditions include an expansive conception of (the narration of) phenomenological experience that exceeds the human and narratives that query the shifting manifestations of animality within humans, between humans, between nonhuman animals, and between human and nonhuman animals. As Herman notes, the fictional and nonfictional narratives that he engages tend to be post-Darwinian, but the book incorporates a vast array of genres, periods, and mediums that enable different affordances in relationship to imagining animal experience. Moreover, in its coda, the book discusses the idea that Quentin Meillassoux describes as ancestrality, or forms of knowledge of the real that exceed human perception. The chapter persuasively rethinks allegory to model such accounts. As this description begins to indicate, the book is an exceedingly rich one. I expect it to take its place among books like Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) and Hayden White’s The Content of the Form (1987) as a narratological touchstone for generations to come

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