Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World

315 Pages·2018·8.29 MB·English

by  Anita Tarr

POSTHUMANISM
YOUNG ADULT FICTION
IN
Children’s Literature Association Series
POSTHUMANISM

YOUNG ADULT
IN
FICTION Finding

Humanity
in Posthuman

a
World
Edited by Anita Tarr
and Donna R. White
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of
the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2018 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2018
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-4968-1669-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1670-2 (epub single)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1671-9 (epub institutional)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1672-6 (pdf single)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1673-3 (pdf institutional)

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Part I. Networked Subjectivities
1 “Open to Me. Maybe I Can Help”: Networked Consciousness
and Ethical Subjectivity in Octavia E . Butler’s Mind of My Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Mathieu Donner
2 Information Disembodiment Takeover: Anxieties of
Technological Determinism in Contemporary Coming-of-Age Narratives . . . . . . . .27
Shannon Hervey
Part II. The Monstrous Other: Posthuman Bodies
3 Once upon a Cyborg: Cinder as Posthuman Fairytale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Angela S. Insenga
4 The Adolescent Posthuman: Reimagining Body Image and Identity
in Marissa Meyer’s Cinder and Julianna Baggott’s Pure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Ferne Merrylees
5 “Those Maps Would Have to Change”: Remapping the Borderlines
of the Posthuman Body in Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
Maryna Matlock
vi Contents
6 “Superpowers Don’t Always Make You a Superhero”: Posthuman Possibilities
in Michael Grant’s Gone Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117
Patricia Kennon
7 Posthumanism in The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium . . . . . . . . . 135
Donna R. White
Part III. Posthumanism in Climate Fiction
8 Coming of Age and the Other: Critical Posthumanism
in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Lars Schmeink
9 Posthuman Potential and Ecological Limit in Future Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Phoebe Chen
Part IV. Accepting/Rejecting Posthumanist Possibilities
10 Negotiating the Human in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199
Torsten Caeners
11 Posthumanist Magic: Beyond the Boundaries
of Humanist Ethics in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Tony M. Vinci
12 China Miéville’s Young Adult Novels: Posthumanist Assemblages . . . . . . . . . . .247
Anita Tarr
Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, the editors would like to thank our contributors for their
patience during the long process of turning this idea into a completed volume.
They were always gracious in accepting our comments and timely with their
revisions. We are amazed at the wide range of perspectives they have consid-
ered to connect posthumanist theories with young adult literature.
Also, many thanks to the Children’s Literature Association Publications
Committee for their cogent appraisals and acceptance of our work.
We both are grateful to our companion species: Donna for her cats, who
liked to type for her when she grew tired; and Anita for her canine Jane Eyre,
who slept faithfully next to her desk.
Anita would also like to thank Rodger for his understanding during her
long absences in her office.
vii

INTRODUCTION
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and
moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how
like a god! The beauty of the world . The paragon of animals . (Hamlet 2 .2 .303–7)
What does it mean to be human? Is it possible to designate a point in the evo-
lution of homo sapiens that marks the first appearance of what we could call
a human being, exhibiting human behavior, representing humanity? If there
were such a point and such a human, did homo sapiens then suddenly stop
evolving—never having to adapt to environmental changes or diseases or food
availability or agricultural practices? Once this human had acquired the skill of
fire-making, would he never see the need to mold a pot or construct a boat or
tame a horse or invent Velcro?
Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of the perfectly proportioned man
(the Vitruvian Man) of the late fifteenth century has helped to crystallize the
belief that humankind, in its Western European manifestation, has reached its
apogee. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment further propagated the idea
that man had, physically and mentally, nowhere else to go. (Spiritually, though,
was obviously another matter.) Factor in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Rationalists’
emphasis on reason over emotion, mind over body, and the value of individual
freedom, and what emerges is the liberal humanists’ portrait of the human
being: rational, independent, autonomous, unified, universal. Mankind reigns
supreme over nature and all other species, the center of this world just as the
earth was once the center of the universe.
The downfall—but not the extinction, for it is still alive and well in many
quarters—of humanism came about as a result of three dramatic steps in phi-
losophy and science, says Neil Badmington: (1) since the acknowledgment that
the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around, humans must
recognize that they are only a small part of the cosmos, not the center of it;
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