Abstract
This chapter introduces key ideas and crucial questions concerning the recent debates about posthumanist theory and its implications for reading the novel. After a brief introduction to philosophical posthumanism, it discusses two literary works, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005), and outlines ways of approaching what is described as a “literary posthumanism” by engaging with questions of form and genre as well as the role of embodiment and creaturely vulnerability for writing and reading novels. Literary posthumanism can be understood both as a challenge of traditional forms of representation and as a call for new forms of interpretation and thus showcases the potential of the novel to stage, negotiate and, ultimately, reconfigure the meaning of concepts such as human exceptionalism, narrative, and art.
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Bartosch, R. (2019). We Have Always Already Been Becoming Posthuman? Posthumanism in Theory and (Reading) Practice. In: Baumbach, S., Neumann, B. (eds) New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_8
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