The Posthumanist Technological Sublime as Cultural Technique: Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

Abstract

This essay argues for exploring sublimity as a cultural technique which is central to processing modern practices of purification and hybridization alike, and which also self-reflexively illuminates the operations and actors of its surrounding human-nonhuman network. The dissection and literal assemblage of a romantic cyborg in “The Man That Was Used Up” serves as an example of how Poe’s self-referential employment of a posthumanist technological sublime counteracts anthropocentric notions of Romantic sublimity which reduce Nature to a means of human arousal and self-elevation.