Chapter 6 - The Posthuman Imagination in Contemporary Literature

Summary

In Chapter 3, I discussed Tom McCarthy’s deviation from transhumanism’s “naive escapist fantasy (of individual self-expression, or the transcendent human spirit, or art-as-redemption and so forth)” (The Guardian, March 7, 2015). In this chapter, I wish to address a minor (but compelling) lineage of novelists, McCarthy among them, who are part of a more object-oriented – and lasting – posthumanist turn in literary practice.

We have already seen in Claire-Louise Bennett a related impatience with mainstream literature as “perhaps the most anthropocentric” artistic medium. Bennett mentions this phrase (with attribution to Italo Calvino) in both her essay in the Irish Times (May 26, 2015) and an interview with Philip Maughan in The Paris Review, titled “The Mind in Solitude” (July 18, 2016). Bennett’s contrarian aesthetic emerges not so much from a plan of action or participation in a designated movement.