Description
Book SynopsisThe enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterises lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, post-industrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness.
The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.
Trade Review"The Human Reimagined
is an unassuming but essential volume. It’s a minor form — the edited collection of academic essays — that undertakes the major work of rearticulating a field of philosophical and political inquiry. The editors and contributors present a vision of a powerful theoretical and philosophical concept of the human based in the material reality of history. It’s that materialist grounding and that range that give posthumanism — and The Human Reimagined
— its radical potential." — LA Review of BooksTable of ContentsI. Introduction
a. Critical Posthumanism
b. Posthumanism in Russia
c. Overview of the Articles
II. Questions of Ethics and Alterity
1. Our Posthuman Past: Subjectivity, History and Utopia in Late-Soviet Science Fiction Elana Gomel, Tel Aviv University
2. Digressions in Progress: Posthuman Loneliness and the Will to Play in the Work of the Strugatsky Brothers Julia Vaingurt, University of Illinois at Chicago
3. Humans, Animals, Machines: Scenarios of Raschelovechivanie in Gray Goo and Matisse Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan
III. Natural, Built, and Imagined Environments
4. Environmentalism and the Man of the Future: Discursive Practices in the 1970s Colleen McQuillen, University of Illinois at Chicago
5. Daedalus and the Cyborg: Human-Machine Hybridity in Late-Soviet Design Diana Kurkovsky West, European University at St. Petersburg
6. Some Entropy in Your Tea: Notes on the Ontopoetics of Artificial Intelligence Alex Anikina, Goldsmiths, University of London
IV. Technologies of the Self
7. Romantic Aesthetics and Cybernetic Fiction Jacob Emery, Indiana University
8. Writing and Technology: Writing the Self in ‘Real Time’ Kristina Toland, Bowdoin College
9. Modes of Perception in Transmodal Fiction: New Russian Subjectivity Katerina Lakhmitko, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
V. Politics and Social Action
10. Nothing but Mammals: Post-Soviet Sexuality after the End of History Trevor Wilson, University of Pittsburgh
11. Postsocialist Platonov: The Question of Humanism and the New Russian Left Jonathan Brooks Platt, University of Pittsburgh
VI. Afterword
Keti Chukhrov, an interview by Alina Kotova about Love Machines
