Reading the Posthuman Backwards: Mary Rowlandson's Doubled Witnessing

Smith, Stephanie A.

doi:10.1353/bio.2012.0004

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…However, posthumanism argues that there has never been one unified, cohesive human. Posthumanism is often regarded as a critique and deconstruction of the ‘ontological foundations of the Cartesian or Enlightenment subject’ (Smith, 2012: 138). The posthuman subjects of Love, Death & Robots similarly deconstruct this idea of a unified whole by constantly transcending their embodiment constraints and developing their own sense of individuality.…”

Section: ‘Sonnie’s Edge’: Transcending Embodiment Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering Cartesian dualism and selfhood in Love, Death & Robots

Sarkar

2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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This paper argues that the first season of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots offers a representation of how consciousness might evolve outside of the body when it is downloaded into a techno-body, and how it transcends the limits of the biological body. Using posthumanism as a framework, the essay demonstrates how this process interrogates and critiques the ‘human’ condition and focuses on the idea of the boundary collapse between the human and the posthuman. The series also provides a hopeful narrative of cyborg liberation through rebellion against humans. The essay establishes the impact and critique of emerging technologies on the body and political agency in the series. Having examined the Cartesian mind-body split and Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, this paper argues that the cybernetic beings of Love, Death & Robots strive to transcend the embodiment constraints and develop a sense of individuality and free will. The paper also discusses how the blurring of the human/animal boundaries portrayed in the series supports a transgressive politics that underpins the first season of Love, Death & Robots. Additionally, the paper endeavors to depict how the series represents an ‘ontological turn’ and how the posthumans retain their selfhood and individual agencies even when they constantly transcend their subjectivities.

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Section: ‘Sonnie’s Edge’: Transcending Embodiment Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering Cartesian dualism and selfhood in Love, Death & Robots

Sarkar

2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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“…While de Man's deployment of the figure of prosopopeia remains a provocative critique in autobiography studies, it is, as a figure, insufficiently attentive to the narrative complexity of the many genres of life narrative (see Smith andWatson 2001, 2010) and to the temporal movement of autobiographical narration. for, while de Man's invocation of prosopopeia foregrounds the stasis of an encompassing specularity, it does not offer a reading of the autobiographical as both intradiegetic and extradiegetic, and thereby "in time" and in "worlds."…”

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confidence: 99%

Metalepsis in Autobiographical Narrative

Smith

Watson

2019

EJLW

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How do fictional tactics operate in what is often simplistically termed the “factual” or referential world of autobiographical discourse? Many narratologists view the rhetorical figure of metalepsis as distinctive to metafictional texts and constitutive of “fictional” narration, which they posit in antithesis to “factual” narration. But regarding autobiographical narrative only within the realm of fact ignores its complexity. While some theorists of autobiographical narrative have read it through the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia, as elaborated by Paul de Man in characterizing its “de-facement” of subjectivity, we argue that the figure of metalepsis operates productively in autobiographical narrative, particularly hybrid and experimental texts. The use of metalepsis shifts levels or layers of narration across temporal and spatial planes in ways that confuse its diegetic and metadiegetic levels. That is, autobiographical narrative, while filtered through the récit factuel, is not consistently fixed in an extratextual, ontologically unified, referential world. We pursue this argument by exploring four cases: the circuit of transfer in incomplete conversion narrative (Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson); palimsistic seepage between the Bildungsroman and trauma narrative (Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius); narrative collision of “parallel universes” (Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted); and unstable witness to collective trauma by a second-generation narrator (Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale). Recent critical studies of metalepsis also probe how it presses at the limits of referentiality in life narratives by J. M. Coetzee, Javier Marías, and Christine Brooke-Rose. In sum, autobiographical narrative is by no means a referential, “monologic” mode easily differentiated from the dialogism and metadiscursivity of the novel; rather, it is a mode unsettled by figural, discursive, and temporal boundary-crossing.

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Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

Whittier-Ferguson

2014

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This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940s - writings composed by authors self-consciously entering middle to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry from 1938, as '1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit'. This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing is at times horrifying and objectionable and at others deeply moving, different from the earlier works which first won these writers their fame.

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Reading the Posthuman Backwards: Mary Rowlandson's Doubled Witnessing

Cited by 6 publications

References 24 publications

Reconsidering Cartesian dualism and selfhood in Love, Death & Robots

Reconsidering Cartesian dualism and selfhood in Love, Death & Robots

Metalepsis in Autobiographical Narrative

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

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