Human, All Too Human / Edition 1

by Diana Fuss

Overview

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. Human, All Too Human considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism? Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. Human, All Too Human examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by things and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them. The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415915007
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/27/1995
Series:	Essays from the English Institute
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Diana Fuss is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference and Identification Papers, both published by Routledge.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Diana Fuss; Part 1 Animal; Chapter 1 Heavy Petting, Marjorie Garber; Chapter 2 Barring the Cross, Harriet Ritvo; Part 2 Thing; Chapter 3 The Dream of a Butterfly, Rey Chow; Chapter 4 City Things, Nancy Armstrong; Chapter 5 Muteness Envy, Barbara Johnson; Chapter 6 1553: Putting a First Foot Forward, David Wills; Part 3 Child; Chapter 7 “A Heterogeneous Thing”: Female Childhood and the Rise of Racial Thinking in Victorian Britain, Cora Kaplan; Chapter 8 Producing Erotic Children, James R. Kincaid; Chapter 9 The Right to Abortion and the Imaginary Domain, Drucilla Cornell;