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HUMANIZING THE POSTHUMAN IN POWERS, WALLACE, GIBSON AND DELILLO

Ghashmari, Ahmad
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent147855115808631

Abstract Details

2016, PHD, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
For centuries, the liberal humanist subject has been widely considered the defining status of human existence, at least in the western tradition. Liberal humanism embraces a humanist subject characterized by agency, autonomy and exceptionalism, qualities that do not belong to the non-human. This understanding of the human subject, however, has recently been challenged by posthumanist and transhumanist theories that see the advancement in technology and its influence on the nature of the human-nonhuman relationship as a basis for a new understanding of humanness. In spite of their conflicting differences on the future of the human, posthumanism and transhumanism have declared the death of liberal humanism. This dissertation contests this declaration. Through an analysis of a sample of novels published in the 1990’s and 2000’s, this study aims to argue that posthumanism is more a re-appropriation and reconceptualization of the remaining aspects of liberal humanism than an abandonment of it. Despite the challenges to most of the values of liberal humanism by postmodernism and poststructuralism and despite the rise of the machine, the emergence of commodity culture and globalization, contemporary novelists including Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, and Don DeLillo depict liberal humanist values as surviving and still relevant in the posthuman age. The argument of this study, therefore, is that posthumanism is shaped not by the end of human exceptionalism but rather by the human response to the realization that this exceptionalism needs to be understood in new ways. This response emerges in the form of an urgency to re-appropriate and re-inscribe human subjectivity, autonomy and agency within posthumanism. Moreover, as this study aims to present a new definition of posthumanism, it also aims to reject the transhumanist philosophy that sees humans transcending their nature into a technological singularity or a post-biological existence. The novels studied in this dissertation are Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers, Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace, Pattern Recognition (2003) by William Gibson, and Cosmopolis (2003) by Don DeLillo. eb
Tammy Clewell (Advisor)
171 p.
American Literature; Literature

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Citations

  • Ghashmari, A. (2016). HUMANIZING THE POSTHUMAN IN POWERS, WALLACE, GIBSON AND DELILLO [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent147855115808631

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ghashmari, Ahmad. HUMANIZING THE POSTHUMAN IN POWERS, WALLACE, GIBSON AND DELILLO. 2016. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent147855115808631.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ghashmari, Ahmad. "HUMANIZING THE POSTHUMAN IN POWERS, WALLACE, GIBSON AND DELILLO." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent147855115808631

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.