Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

by Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy

Overview

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism brings together scholars working in prehistoric, classical, medieval, and early modern studies who are developing, from longer and slower historical perspectives, critical post/humanisms that explore: 1) the significance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression and affectivity; 2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; 3) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting human selves; 4) the importance of history in defining the human; 5) the artistic plasticity of the human; 6) the question of a human collectivity—what is the value, and peril, of “being human” or “being post/human” together?; and finally, 7) the constructive, and destructive, relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman.
 
This volume, edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy, insists on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of various humanisms, over time, while also aiming to demonstrate the different ways these formations emerge (and also disappear) in different times and places, from the most ancient past to the most contemporary present. The essays are offered as “fragments” because the authors do not believe there can ever be a “total history” of either the human or the post/human as they play themselves out in differing historical contexts. At the same time, the volume as a whole argues that defining what “the human” (or “post/human”) is has always been an ongoing, never finished cultural project.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814252710
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	07/30/2016
Series:	Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Myra Seaman is Professor of English at the College of Charleston. Eileen A. Joy is the Founding Director of Punctum Books and the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group, and is based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction. The Work, or the Agency, of the Nonhuman in Premodern Art

PART I. Singularities, Species, Inter/faces
1. Paleolithic Representations of Human Being at Chauvet and Rouffignac
2. Eros, Event, and Non-Faciality in Malory’s “The Tale of Balyn and Balan”
3. The Book of Hours and iPods, Passionate Lyrics, and Prayers: Technologies of the Devotional Self
4. What Does Language Speak? Feeling the Human with Samuel Beckett and Chrétien de Troyes

PART II. Human, Inhuman, Spectacle
5. Aninormality
6. Humanist Waste
7. How Delicious We Must Be / Folcuin’s Horse and the Dog’s Gowther, Beyond Care
8. Excusing Laius: Freud’s Oedipus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Lydgate’s Edippus

Coda: The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night, Stewards of the Posthuman, and the Problem of Aesthetics

Editorial Reviews

This collection is full of readerly joys, both literary and theoretical. Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism will appeal to students and scholars and can be introduced easily into the classroom at the senior undergraduate and graduate levels.” —Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia
 

From the Publisher