Abstract
Fictional narratives have arguably contributed to establishing humanist assumptions in the West, with the genre of the “realist” novel taking on a particularly significant role in this process. However, narratives can also work towards a critique of humanism. The chapter first examines a number of “posthumanist narratives” in science fiction, a speculative (and anti-realist) genre that resonates strongly with posthumanism. A reading of Chris Ware’s comic book Building Stories complements this discussion by showing that posthumanist concerns may also emerge outside of science fiction, through Ware’s foregrounding of disability and nonhuman spaces. The chapter’s central claim is that narrative’s encounter with posthumanism goes well beyond plot and subject-matter, and that formal strategies – particularly nonlinearity and the use of nonhuman characters – are a crucial site of negotiation of human-nonhuman entanglement in narrative.
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Acknowledgements
While working on this chapter, the author has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 714166).
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Caracciolo, M. (2022). Narrative and Posthumanism/Posthumanist Narratives. In: Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_54
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