POSTHUMAN: POSTHUMANIST LITERARY IMAGINATION

P.I.: Ricardo Gil Soeiro

Description

The project aims at exploring the ways in which posthumanist literary imagination contributes to a critical awareness of the limits of traditional anthropocentric and humanistic assumptions, thus radically challenging boundaries between the human and the non-human, the self and the other, the organic and the technological. By providing a post-dualistic and a non-hierarchical standpoint to reflect upon issues such as subjectivity, otherness, and ethics, such a multi-layered posthumanist approach offers a re-thinking of far-reaching debates on the future of humanism. Conducting case-study analyses of paradigmatic literary works, the present project significantly departs from previous scholarship, in that it values literature’s seminality in these debates and hopes to show how posthumanist theory can illuminate literary texts and how these can, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory.

Objectives

The chief goals of the present research project are to:

• Explore new theoretical approaches to posthumanism and trace new avenues for future research on posthumanism as it touches upon topics such as subjectivity, hermeneutics, and literary imagination;
• Critically examine through case-studies analyses the way in which literary representations of subjectivity uniquely illustrate and body forth questions pertaining to the de-centering of the human and the logic of the anthropocentric metaphysics (towards a new conceptual understanding of life beyond the self);
• Actively contribute to the constitution of an active intellectual and scientific community of posthumanism;
• Produce a wide range of project deliverables which will improve our understanding of posthumanist literature and cause a significant impact on the field of posthumanism as a whole.

Team