Posthumanist Reading Research Articles

A singing bird inside the human mind: a posthumanist rereading of Wallace Stevens

ABSTRACT This article presents a posthumanist reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Credences of Summer’, and ‘Of Mere Being’, and discusses what it means to be post/human. Posthumanism fundamentally challenges the human/non-human divide and posits a hybrid concept of humanity that traditional humanism may well consider nonhuman. I argue that Stevens’ poetry aligns with such posthumanist views. The first three poems represent an all-encompassing non-human nature beyond human knowledge and power, thus suggesting that the typical anthropocentric worldview of humanism is unsustainable. Nevertheless, a physical and qualitative distinction between the human and the nonhuman remains intact in these poems. This non-anthropocentric dualism is reconfigured at the non-dualistic moment envisioned in ‘Of Mere Being’, when an artificial bird on an artificial tree is singing within the mind of an anonymous person, who is nearing death and thus about to become nonhuman. The recognition of this radical vision of humanity in this canonical text reaffirms that the posthuman does not necessarily align with contemporaneity but is rather immanent inside the human, awaiting discovery.

The AI Revolution: A Posthumanist Reading of the (Re)Presentations of Artificial Intelligence in Selected Contemporary Films

Artificial Intelligence (AI) transcends mere technological advancement, taking on profound philosophical, ethical, and cultural significance. This study focuses on the representation of AI in contemporary films, a medium that reflects society’s shifting concerns and aspirations regarding humanity’s relationship with technology. Despite the growing importance of AI in our lives, a gap remains in understanding how films depict AI and contribute to societal discourse on autonomy, ethics, and identity. The study aims to examine key themes in films such as Ex Machina (2014), Her (2013), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and The Matrix (1999), exploring how these portrayals influence our perception of AI. Employing a posthumanist theoretical framework, this study investigates how AI is represented as the “Other” and the ethical responsibilities involved in creating autonomous entities. Methods include a thematic analysis of these films, focusing on how AI characters are depicted and the moral dilemmas presented. Key findings highlight that cinema often frames AI through a lens of human anxieties—particularly around autonomy, ethical responsibility, and identity formation. These films present both utopian and dystopian visions of AI’s role in society, offering diverse perspectives on the implications for human identity and agency. The study concludes that cinema plays a pivotal role in shaping public understanding of AI and its transformative potential, raising critical questions about the future of humanity in an increasingly AI-integrated world. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cinema, Posthumanism, Literary Criticism, Sustainability (SDG 12)

Posthumanist Reading of Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales and Her Representations of African American Family

This study presents a new posthumanist reading of Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales (2007), proposing a novel vision of familial relationships. The primary focus of my analysis is on the posthumanist representations of the African American family in A Million Nightingales, which suggest the blurring of existing boundaries and hierarchies through the underscoring of the importance of memory, body marks, and animated things. I draw inspiration from both Jane Bennett’s and Donna Haraway’s theories, assuming that a new reading of the novel should focus on the importance of embracing all the differences to create a more interconnected and harmonious existence for all beings.

A Posthumanist Reading of the Voyage in “The White Ship”

ABSTRACT This article proposes a posthumanist reading of the voyage in Lovecraft’s short story “The White Ship.” The lighthouse symbolizes anthropocentrism, but the nautical voyage, as a narrative disruption, dismantles the monopoly of anthropocentrism, and inserts the narrator into a posthumanist world. Instead of being a silent backdrop, the ocean becomes a portal to these unknown territories, and reveals itself as an agent of unpredictable forces. The forgetting of aesthetics and the denigration of technology first discard human civilization. Then, the diminution of sight, as well as the strengthening of the auditory and olfactory senses, further dismantle human monopoly, and open a gate to broaden the spectrum of nonhuman agents. Finally, the narrator goes beyond anthropocentric superiority, integrates himself into nature, and reaches the realm of posthumanist symbiosis.

Antarctic Expedition and Geological Agency: A Posthumanist Reading of “At the Mountains of Madness”

Antarctic Expedition and Geological Agency: A Posthumanist Reading of “At the Mountains of Madness”

A Posthumanist Reading of the Dog in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

A Posthumanist Reading of the Dog in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Terms of entanglement: a posthumanist reading of Terms of Service

ABSTRACT Contemporary connected things entail ongoing relations between producers, end users, and other actors characterized by ongoing updates and production of data about and through use. These relations are currently governed by Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents, which are known to be mostly ignored beyond the required interaction of ticking a box to indicate consent. This seems to be a symptom of failure to design for effectively mediating ongoing relations among multiple stakeholders involving multiple forms of value generation. In this paper, we use ToS as an entrance point to explore design practices for democratic data governance. Drawing on posthuman perspectives, we make three posthuman design moves exploring entanglements, decentering, and co-performance in relation to Terms of Service. Through these explorations we begin to sketch a space for design to engage with democratic data governance through a practice of what we call revealing design that is aimed at meaningfully making visible these complex networked relations in actionable ways. This approach is meant to open alternative possible trajectories that could be explored for design to enable genuine democratic data governance.

Reconfiguring Community of Practice as Socio-Material Practices for Making Differences With/in the World: A Creative-Relational Inquiry

As a concept Community of Practice (CoP) is generally understood as a learning system in which a group of people within a profession, or practice field, reflect and learn together. Notions of situated learning and enculturation emphasise the socially constructed nature of these contextualized reflexive pedagogical processes. Engaging with the posthuman turn in education and the social sciences, we think with concepts from Karen Barad’s agential realism framework to reconfigure CoP as entangled affective, socio-material knowledge-making practices. Specifically, through creative-relational inquiry, this paper offers an account of three intra-active mo(ve)ments from a posthumanist reading group CoP in Aotearoa New Zealand in which we, as academics in counselling, social work, and early childhood education, experimented with arts-based inquiry and posthuman texts. We discuss the more expansive knowing made possible through our engagement with/in these differentiated, in/determinate mo(ve)ments as professional practice educators and researchers. This paper contributes to onto-ethical-relational research and teaching practices, enabling CoP to be re-configured from socially constructed reflexive processes to affirmative, affective, socio-material practices for making differences in the world.

Thinking with traces: A posthumanist reading of human and nonhuman agencies in Zhu Yingchun’s The Language of Bugs

The Language of Bugs by Zhu Yingchun (2018) is an art book wavering between the linguistic and the bodily, visual arts and literature. Consisting of thousands of traces left on paper by real-life insects and their bodily movements, it does not contain any text traditionally readable for humans, but claims to be a book written entirely in the language of insects. The traces indicate nonhuman agency for the insects and present writing and literature as subjects of nonhuman actions and messy interspecies collaboration. At the same time, the book rises questions on insect “language” and the possibility of ethical representation originating from a very human point-of-experience. In this article, I reflectively explore different crossings of human and nonhuman agencies in The Language of Bugs, as well as how the book engages with questions of representation and materiality, writing and literature in the framework of posthumanist reading. I analyse the book as participating in the attempt to notice more-than-human ways of being in literature and culture, which are traditionally only perceived through human agency. The context of my reading is threat posed by ecological crises and especially the decline in insect populations for the future of the planet. I argue that Zhu Yingchun’s book represents a wider shift in thinking about the natural world and humans’ place in it. Ultimately, the book articulates one very basic question: can literature widen to include traces of nonhuman movements?

A posthumanist reading of the “happy” fish in The Zhuangzi

ABSTRACT This article argues for an alternative interpretation of the happy fish scene in The Zhuangzi: the fish are not happy. The fish undergo an unpleasant experience while the philosophers debate animatedly over the joy of the fish. The dramatization of the fish scene compels us to contemplate anthropocentrism and species communication. Moreover, the contrast between the fish-bird becoming and the subsequent human narrations reinforces the anthropocentric usurpation of nonhuman agency. To get away from anthropocentrism, Zhuangzi proposes a posthumanist approach to deal with species communication in three interconnected stages: to acknowledge the limits of human cognition, to forget anthropocentric prejudice, and to de-obscure childlike innocence.

Technium and Posthuman Becoming: A Critical Posthumanist Reading of Dan Brown’s Origin

As human beings have entered the twenty-first century, they have evolved to become a constantly evolving, super-intelligent, and posthuman species in this techno-driven era. Contemporary human beings are not the same Homo sapiens, the early modern humans, who are believed to have evolved 2, 00,000 years ago in East Africa. Over the course of time, Homo sapiens have undergone several significant biological, lingual, and ontological adaptations to survive, populate, and control the world. So, as contemporary critical posthumanists claim, human beings have become post-human beings and are always in the process of ‘becoming’ or evolving. Also, critical posthumanists uphold that the becoming of the posthuman happens only in the interconnectedness or symbiosis of humans with non-humans. Dan Brown’s Origin deals with one such imaginable possibility of humans evolving further into posthuman beings because of their symbiotic relationship with technium. The novel prophecies or predicts the realistic as well as the imaginable possibility of the human species mixing or merging with technology into a complex, interconnected, interdependent species becoming posthuman beings in the near future. The objective of this research paper is to use critical posthumanism theory to read, analyze, and interpret Dan Brown’s Origin. The researcher highlights and analyses the fictional possibility of humans in their symbiosis, intra-action, and trans-corporeality with technium, i.e. engagement and fusion with the modern technologies that alter humans’ subjectivity and identity evolving to become posthuman beings through critical posthumanist reading of Dan Brown’s Origin.

Ethics, Genes-Editing and Digital Immortality: A Posthumanist Reading of Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun

Technology has played its role in enhancing people's quality of lives by boosting their innate competence. Genetic Engineering and Digital immortality are recent developments in this field.This study intends to examine the darkside of advanced technology in Genetic Engineering and the complexities regarding digital immortality with textual references from Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.The analysis of text is dealt with under the theoretical paradigm of ethical debates on genetic engineering in Francesca Ferrando’s posthuman bioethics from her work Philosophical Posthumanism and Micheal Sandel’s The Case against Perfection. Moreover, the issues of consciousness and mind-uploading also make the base of the study. This study finds that these advance technologies have also negative impacts on humans and society.

Posthumanist stylistics

I present a posthumanist approach to literary interpretation using stylistic analysis. It is posthumanist since i) digital cameras/audio-video resources and editing applications prompt multimodal readings of literary works unlikely from human intuition alone; ii) anthropocentrism in literary texts is defamiliarised. I highlight how stylistic analysis can be used productively for developing multimodal creativity in posthumanist reading by motivating audio-video edits and effects. I model using Anne Brontë’s poem ‘Home’ (1846). When read only with intuition, ‘Home’ communicates young Brontë’s yearning for her family home. In contrast, this article has a non-intuitive digital multimodal realisation of this poem where a young Californian stuck in London because of pandemic (Covid-19) travel restrictions yearns for her home state in the aftermath of wildfires linked to anthropogenic climate change. This posthumanist transformative reading, flagging the negative repercussions of humans for their planetary home, defamiliarises the poem’s anthropocentric normality. Importantly, I show how stylistic analysis of ‘Home’ motivates creative use of audio-visual edits and effects in the posthumanist multimodal reading. The article makes contrast with standard interpretive practice in stylistics (‘humanist stylistics’). It also reflects on the value of posthumanist stylistics for extending students’ creative thinking in an educational context.

Reiteration and automaton: A posthumanist reading of repetition in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan

ABSTRACT This article compares repetition in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan from three perspectives: repetition as a mechanism, a revelation, and a solution. First, repetition enables us to detect underlying structures. Zhuangzi loses himself in observing the intricate animal relationships (the mantis, cicada, magpie) without any knowledge of being watched over by a garden-keeper. Lacan rewrites these positions into three stages of human development. Repetition also serves as a revelation. The four repetitions of the magus’ diagnoses reveal the shift from the transparent subject to the opaque subject. Lacan absorbs this mysterious Daoist concept and rewrites repetition as “an encounter with the real.” Finally, to restore the symbiotic coexistence with things, Zhuangzi resorts to repetition. Like Zhuangzi, Lacan acknowledges the capacity for repetition to enable our encounter with the Real; unlike Zhuangzi, Lacan holds that the primary function of repetition is to “haul” the subject from collapsing into the Real.

"Ethico-Onto-Epistemologie" und/als queer-posthumanistische Leseweise(n) von Barbara Frischmuths Roman <em>Die Mystifikationen der Sophie Silber</em>

Based on a posthumanist theory framework and laid out as a queer-posthumanist reading this article explores Barbara Frischmuth's novel Die Mystifikationen der Sophie Silber along various figures of thought and concepts by Karen Barad* and other posthumanist theoreticians whose decisive approaches lay in the questioning of anthropocentric humanist categories and dichotomous, hierarchically structured models of world order. Frischmuth's novel provides multiple points of application for a posthumanist reading strategy since non-human beings, such as fairies and mythical creatures, occupy privileged positions, hierarchies and ontologies are flattened or turned upside down, anthropocentric orders of thought are overcome, and alternative world designs are tested, thus subverting the supposed superiority of human cognitive power and morality.

Plague, Nature, Planetary Future: A Posthumanist Reading of The Scarlet Plague

This article proposes a posthumanist reading of Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, and argues that to secure a sustainable planetary future, human beings should understand the posthumanist nature of the world, and learn to respect nature. This article investigates two kinds of worlds, showing a preference for the posthumanist one after the plague over the anthropocentric one before the plague. In the anthropocentric world, the life of human beings is heavily industrialized and isolated from nature, and this causes disaster. However, in the posthumanist world, everything follows natural laws. Human beings are no longer dominators of the world, but share the planet with the nonhuman. In this way, both the human and the nonhuman survive and prosper. Thus, posthumanist thinking provides human beings with a way to make sustainable developments and to build a bright future.

Back to the Future of Tragedy: Some Notes on Brecht's Reading of Shakespeare

This article revisits Brechtian tragedy through a posthumanist reading framed through reference, particularly, to the work of N. Katherine Hayles, doing so in the context of broader questions about how genres decline (e.g. the pastoral, the georgic, the epic though not, inevitably, the tragic). The de-centring of humanistic assumptions and practices would seem to invite a re-visioning of the tragic, one shorn of traditional generic and affective certainties, and attentive to new technological imperatives.

Cur Homo Deus? A Catholic Response to a Posthumanist Narrative

Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus has popularized and promoted the case for a posthumanist reading of universal history in the 21st century. Among the features of his narrative are atheism, a deterministic rejection of free will, and a hedonistic theory of value. Passing the seventieth anniversary of Humani Generis, Pius XII’s call for “seriousness, moderation and measure” when weighing and judging the conclusions of human science, including theories of evolution, remains relevant. With special attention to Anselm of Canterbury’s aptly titled Cur Deus Homo, this essay will identify and respond to several misrepresentations of key Christian doctrines which, when corrected, undermine the reliability of Harari’s narrative history and speculations. Rather than conceding Harari’s posthumanist conclusion that humanity’s path to divinity is a global, social agenda of biological and technological upgrade, I counterargue that Christian soteriology better responds to the deepest longings in human dissatisfaction through notions of grace and love manifest in the doctrines of incarnation and divine satisfaction.

“A New Race of Immortals”: A Posthumanist Reading of “Poe Posthumous; or, the Light-House”

This article proposes a posthumanist reading of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House,” and argues that posthumanism provides human beings with a new way of living. In the story, the narrator comes to the Light-House at Viña de Mar to participate in a scientific experiment. As an “exemplary specimen of Homo sapiens,” the narrator endeavours to preserve human knowledge, which symbolises his superiority over nonhuman species. However, on becoming further involved in nature, he gradually abandons his anthropocentric thought, and learns to live with other species. The posthumanist thought finds its full expression in the symbiotic coexistence of multiple species and culminates in the narrator’s cross-species marriage to a female Cyclophagus. The juxtaposition of the decentring of anthropocentrism with the ascent of nonhuman agents highlights the posthumanist coexistence of humans and nonhumans.

A Posthumanist Reading of ‘The Sphinx’ and ‘Mesmeric Revelation’

This article proposes a new reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s two short stories ‘The Sphinx’ and ‘Mesmeric Revelation’. The moth/monster conversation in ‘The Sphinx’ dramatizes Poe’s speculation of the world. The monster-like cosmos is mysterious and elusive, however human beings endeavor to contain and stabilize it into the hierarchy of human knowledge. ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ goes beyond the surface stability and unearths a hidden world of becoming. This process also marks a progression from anthropocentrism to posthumanism. In this posthumanist world, the decentering of human beings enables the equality of multiple species and their harmonious symbiosis. Poe’s hypothetical world of particles further consolidates this posthumanist reading: all things originate from indivisible particles, and particles are in a constant process of becoming and coalescing, capable of infinite potentialities. Once the particles are perceived by human organs, they will configurate into reality in accord with human idiosyncrasy. ‘The Sphinx’ accentuates the scientific aspects of moth/monster, and ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ highlights the mysterious dimensions of the issue; together they outline the obscure path from anthropocentrism to posthumanism in Poe’s epistemology.