Modernism's Inhuman Worlds (eBook)

Rasheed Tazudeen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
300 Seiten
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5017-7651-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction?

Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book's central argument, offer a means toward what Franz Kafka calls an "otherwise" speaking, based on language's obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, Tazudeen analyzes an inhuman modernist lineage—spanning from Darwin, Carroll, and Flaubert, through Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, to contemporary poetic works—as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism's planetary and inhuman aesthetics, as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

Autor

Rasheed Tazudeen is Lecturer in English at Yale University.

Inhalt

Introduction: What Rhymes with Odradek?
1. Growth: Multispecies Metaphor and the Riddle of Being
2. Sediments: Ground and Under Ground in Alice and On the Origin of Species
3. Dust: Metaphorics of Contagion: Flaubert and Joyce
4. Soils: Kafka's Inhuman Fidelities
5. Sky: The Inhuman Comedy of Woolf's Between the Acts
6. Forest, Ocean, Planet (Green & Blue): Metamodernism's Post-extinction Archives

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.8.2024
• Zusatzinfo: 8 b&w halftones
• Verlagsort: Ithaca
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: animal metaphors, Victorian literature, ecological theory, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
• ISBN-10: 1-5017-7651-7 / 1501776517
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-7651-9 / 9781501776519