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Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care
Author(s): Amelia DeFalco (Author)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication Date: December 19, 2023
- Language: English
- Print length: 212 pages
- ISBN-10: 0192886126
- ISBN-13: 9780192886125
Book Description
Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models’ capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like
Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new humanimal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship.Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction,
Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.Editorial Reviews
Review
“Frequent, careful, and extensive close readings demonstrate and clarify the argument and its stakes throughout the book. The chapters are both self-contained and accumulating toward a clearly stated and supported conclusion. As the argument builds, in DeFalco’s conversational and inviting style, so do connections to a wide range of existing scholarship and tracks are laid for connections to related scholarship as well as current urgently needed engagements. The BSLS Book Prize has been well earned.” — Jenni Halpin, Modern and Contemporary
“This book by DeFalco is a timely intervention in the area of posthumanism and the various facets of posthuman care. Although a significant amount of literature exists on posthuman care, it is deficient in supporting evidence from speculative fiction. The appeal of Curious Kin revolves around its ability to incorporate a diverse range of real-life and fictional scenarios. It offers a complete philosophical and ontological take on posthuman care, deriving insights from diverse fields of study.” — Journal of Posthumanism
“DeFalco takes readers on an exciting journey through the landscapes of posthumanism, both real and imagined…she concentrates on the excluded places and abandoned forms of life that congregate to create new modes of survival and vitality. DeFalco has written a boundary-challenging book, extending her core arguments about relationality to the pathologized and toxic badlands of dystopian modernity. DeFalco’s posthumanist slant deconstructs anthropocentric hierarchies and recomposes them into their horizontal and relational components. Curious Kin shines with originality and liveliness, offering a perspective from the critical humanities and literary studies to enrich debates in STS and affiliated sub-fields about human, non-human and technological relationships.” — Stephen Katz, Tecnoscienza- Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
About the Author
Amelia DeFalco is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of
Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (2016), and co-editor of Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (2018).{“@context”:”https://schema.org”,”@type”:”Book”,”name”:”Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care”,”image”:”https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31QQuW18NvL._SY445_SX342_FMwebp_.jpg”,”author”:{“@type”:”Person”,”name”:”Amelia DeFalco (Author)”},”publisher”:{“@type”:”Organization”,”name”:”Oxford University Press”},”datePublished”:”December 19, 2023″,”isbn”:”9780192886125″,”numberOfPages”:212,”inLanguage”:”English”,”description”:”Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of ‘turns’ – the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn – that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy’s central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered ‘human’.Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models’ capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new humanimal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.”,”url”:”https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192886126/”,”bookFormat”:”http://schema.org/EBook”,”additionalType”:”http://schema.org/PDF”,”fileSize”:”26 MB”,”accessibilityFeature”:[“login required”,”member access only”],”accessibilitySummary”:”PDF version available to authenticated members only. File size: 26 MB.”}
