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Rethinking the Animal: Post-Humanist Tendencies in (Post) Modern Literature
Gridneva, Yana ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...
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Postmodernity's Search for Postgender: Brophy, Winterson and Place
Peková, Olga ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
Postmodernity's Search for Postgender: Bropy, Winterson and Place (Abstract) The thesis examines three formally very diverse texts published in 1969, 1993 and 2013 respectively that creatively approach and subvert the gender binary: Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and Vanessa Place's Boycott. Based on Jean-François Lyotard's conception of postmodernism as modernism in a constantly nascent state, the author advances a hypothesis of "postgender." This however does not mean overcoming gender for good (as it is sometimes understood, for example by Rosi Braidotti), but as a structural momentum, a possibility of subversion at the heart of any gender schema and currently therefore of genderism, i.e. the belief that gender is necessarily binary and that aspects of our gender are inherently linked to our sex assigned at birth. Apart from feminist theory and literary criticism, the thesis also touches on the field of transgender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy of history and most importantly the work of Jacques Derrida. In so doing it tries to articulate the notion of postgender as part and parcel of the condition of postmodernity and a culmination of the modern split of the subject, leading to a certain cultural gender turn during the 1990s. The work nevertheless remains...
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Rethinking the Animal: Post-Humanist Tendencies in (Post) Modern Literature
Gridneva, Yana ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...
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