Browsing by Subject "Literature, General"

"Anthropomorphic Attachments" undertakes an examination of the human as a highly nebulous, fluid, multiple, and often contradictory concept, one that cannot be approached directly or in isolation, but only in its constitutive relationality with the world. Rather than trying to find a way outside of the dualism between human and not-human, I take up the concept of anthropomorphization as a way to hypersaturate the question of the human. Within this hypersaturated field of inquiry, I focus on the specific anthropomorphic relationalities between human and humanoid technology. Focusing primarily on contemporary U.S. technologies and cultural forms, my dissertation looks at artificial intelligence and robotics in conversation with their cultural imaginaries in contemporary literature, science fiction, film, performance art, and video games, and in conversation with contemporary philosophies of the human, the posthuman, and technology. In reading these discourses as shaping, informing, and amplifying each other and the multiple conceptions of the human they articulate, "Anthropomorphic Attachments" attends to these multiple humans and the multiple morphologies by which anthropomorphic relationalities imagine and inscribe both humanoid technologies and the human itself.

Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.