Modernist Ethics And Posthumanism PDF Download

"This dissertation examines modernism, particularly modernist encounters with technology and the body, through the lens of posthumanist thought; the theories and lexicon of posthumanism illuminate modernist poetic encounters with forms of alterity and in so doing modernism and posthumanism reconfigure one another. Each of the project's three chapters examines the work of a different writer--Marianne Moore, H.D., and Mina Loy--by way of a different strand of posthumanist thought, ranging from Donna Haraway's work with companion species, to N. Katherine Hayles's theories on code and embodiment, to Rosi Braidotti's posthumanist investigations of necropolitics. I read Moore's, H.D.'s, and Loy's poetic texts as articulating posthumanist, ethical strategies that, through forms of alternative embodiment, expand beyond binary definitions of self and other, interrogate structures of power that perpetuate these definitions, and imagine bodily identities--particularly for women, and particularly through poetic form--that resist and fall outside of such containing, oppressive forces. This project also argues throughout that poetry is particularly important to these writers' modernist posthumanism. The first chapter focuses on Marianne Moore and her so-called "animiles"--her poems that depict animal subjects-- rereading established narratives about Moore and her modernism. Although criticism has often aligned Moore with certain facets of humanist thought, I argue that Haraway's concept of posthumanist "contact zones" is in fact more appropriate to describe her poetic work's relationship to the animal domain. What I read as Moore's prosthetic, figurative language and her mechanical syllabic metre hyperextend and embody these animals alternatively in non-normative ways, rendering them ultimately unknowable, so that these animals and the poems' own forms frustrate contained narratives about the other or the "whole body."Chapter Two examines H.D.'s roman à clef Asphodel through Hayles's How We Became Posthuman, tracing how the protagonist Hermione seeks out the universal qualities of Morse code in order to create a "spiritual Esperanto." Although this project fails, Hermione's engagement with Morse code nonetheless constructs a poetic, technological, and embodied language out of this code. In Asphodel, the language of Morse code has materiality and is rooted in the body; in my reading, Hermione likewise engages in a form alternative embodiment via Morse code that creates space for female identity outside of patriarchal structures while acknowledging the pain of the subjugated body.As the last full chapter of this project, Chapter Three examines the role of death in Mina Loy's poetry through Rosi Braidotti's posthumanist work with necropolitics. Loy's husband Arthur Cravan disappeared off the coast of Mexico in 1918 and was presumed dead. This situation, while tragic for Loy, provides a critical spur for exploring Loy's posthumanist, necropolitical treatment of the ghostly body in death. Loy's involvement in Italian Futurism's and Christian Science's technological and bodily discourses, as well as her work with modernist impersonality, informs her handling of this alternative body. The project's coda moves from modernist posthumanism towards what I offer as a posthumanist way of reading, inspired by contemporary work in the digital humanities, that explores the layers of H.D.'s Madrigal Cycle through topic modeling and the intersections of close, human reading and distant, machine reading. In my reading, topic modeling's machine readings can productively reshape traditional modes of scholarship and interpretation, allowing us to think of the texts ̧ for instance, as word clouds and lexical connections instead of as primarily biographically-produced material, opening up new pathways to interpretation that also connect the organic to the mechanical." --