Download or read book Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction written by Anita Tarr and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Torsten Caeners, Phoebe Chen, Mathieu Donner, Shannon Hervey, Angela S. Insenga, Patricia Kennon, Maryna Matlock, Ferne Merrylees, Lars Schmeink, Anita Tarr, Tony M. Vinci, and Donna R. White For centuries, humanism has provided a paradigm for what it means to be human: a rational, unique, unified, universal, autonomous being. Recently, however, a new philosophical approach, posthumanism, has questioned these assumptions, asserting that being human is not a fixed state but one always dynamic and evolving. Restrictive boundaries are no longer in play, and we do not define who we are by delineating what we are not (animal, machine, monster). There is no one aspect that makes a being human—self-awareness, emotion, artistic expression, or problem-solving—since human characteristics reside in other species along with shared DNA. Instead, posthumanism looks at the ways our bodies, intelligence, and behavior connect and interact with the environment, technology, and other species. In Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, editors Anita Tarr and Donna R. White collect twelve essays that explore this new discipline's relevance in young adult literature. Adolescents often tangle with many issues raised by posthumanist theory, such as body issues. The in-betweenness of adolescence makes stories for young adults ripe for posthumanist study. Contributors to the volume explore ideas of posthumanism, including democratization of power, body enhancements, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, and the environment, by analyzing recent works for young adults, including award-winners like Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, as well as the works of Octavia Butler and China Miéville.
Download or read book Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction written by V. Flanagan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction is not a historical study or a survey of narrative plots, but takes a more conceptual approach that engages with the central ideas of posthumanism: the fragmented nature of posthuman identity, the concept of agency as distributed and collective and the role of embodiment in understandings of selfhood.
Download or read book Posthumanist Readings in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction written by Jennifer Harrison and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If there is one trend in children’s and YA literature that seems to be enjoying a steady rise in popularity, it is the expansion of the YA dystopian genre. While the genre has been lauded for its potential to expand horizons, promote critical thinking, and foster social awareness and activism, it has also come under scrutiny for its promotion of specific ideologies and its often sensationalist approach to real-world problems. In an examination of six YA dystopian texts spanning more than twenty years of development of the genre, this book explores the way in which posthumanist ideologies in particular are deployed or resisted in these texts as a means of making sense of the specific challenges which young people confront in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Cyborg Saints written by Carissa Turner Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saints are currently undergoing a resurrection in middle grade and young adult fiction, as recent prominent novels by Socorro Acioli, Julie Berry, Adam Gidwitz, Rachel Hartman, Merrie Haskell, Gene Luen Yang, and others demonstrate. Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction makes the radical claim that these holy medieval figures are actually the new cyborgs in that they dethrone the autonomous subject of humanist modernity. While young people navigate political and personal forces, as well as technologies, that threaten to fragment and thingify them, saints show that agency is still possible outside of the humanist construct of subjectivity. The saints of these neomedievalist novels, through living a life vulnerable to the other, attain a distributed agency that accomplishes miracles through bodies and places and things (relics, icons, pilgrimage sites, and ultimately the hagiographic text and its reader) spread across time. Cyborg Saints analyzes MG and YA fiction through the triple lens of posthumanism, neomedievalism, and postsecularism. Cyborg Saints charts new ground in joining religion and posthumanism to represent the creativity and diversity of young people’s fiction.
Download or read book Children s Literature and the Posthuman written by Zoe Jaques and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of identity formation in children's literature, this book brings together children’s literature and recent critical concerns with posthuman identity to argue that children’s fiction offers sophisticated interventions into debates about what it means to be human, and in particular about humanity’s relationship to animals and the natural world. In complicating questions of human identity, ecology, gender, and technology, Jaques engages with a multifaceted posthumanism to understand how philosophy can emerge from children's fantasy, disclosing how such fantasy can build upon earlier traditions to represent complex issues of humanness to younger audiences. Interrogating the place of the human through the non-human (whether animal or mechanical) leads this book to have interpretations that radically depart from the critical tradition, which, in its concerns with the socialization and representation of the child, has ignored larger epistemologies of humanness. The book considers canonical texts of children's literature alongside recent bestsellers and films, locating texts such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Pinocchio (1883) and the Alice books (1865, 1871) as important works in the evolution of posthuman ideas. This study provides radical new readings of children’s literature and demonstrates that the genre offers sophisticated interventions into the nature, boundaries and dominion of humanity.
Download or read book The Drowned Cities written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die. In a dark future America where violence, terror, and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man--a bioengineered war beast named Tool--who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible. This thrilling companion to Paolo Bacigalupi's highly acclaimed Ship Breaker is a haunting and powerful story of loyalty, survival, and heart-pounding adventure.
Download or read book Lord of Opium written by Nancy Farmer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matt has always been nothing but a clone - an exact replica, grown from a strip of old El Patron's skin. Now, age fourteen, Matt suddenly finds himself thrust into the position of ruling over his own country, Opium, on the one-time border between the US and Mexico, stretching from the ruins of San Diego to the ruins of Matamoros. But while Opium thrives, the rest of the world has been devastated by ecological disaster… and hidden somewhere in Opium is the cure. And that isn't all that's hidden within the depths of Opium. Matt is haunted by the ubiquitous army of eejits, zombie-like workers harnessed to the old El Patron's sinister system of drug growing... people stripped of the very qualities which once made them human. Matt wants to use his newfound power to help stop the suffering, but he can't even find a way to smuggle his childhood love Maria across the border and into Opium. Instead, his every move hits a roadblock - both from the traitors that surround him and from a voice within himself. For who is Matt really but the clone of an evil, murderous dictator?
Download or read book Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction written by A. Curry and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-02-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study is the first full-length treatment of feminism and the environment in children's literature. Drawing on the history, philosophy and ethics of ecofeminism, it examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic landscapes in young adult fiction reflect contemporary attitudes towards environmental crisis and human responsibility.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman written by Bruce Clarke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers diverse critical treatments from fifteen scholars of the posthuman and posthumanism together in a single volume.
Download or read book Posthumanism written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be human today? The answer to this question, which is as old as the human species itself, is becoming less and less certain. Current technological developments increasingly erode our traditional humanist reflexes: consciousness, emotion, language, intelligence, morality, humour, mortality - all these no longer demonstrate the unique character and value of human existence. Instead, the spectre of the 'posthuman' is now being widely invoked as the 'inevitable' next evolutionary stage that humans are facing. Who comes after the human? This is the question that posthumanists are taking as their starting point. This critical introduction understands posthumanism as a discourse, which, in principle, includes everything that has been and is being said about the figure of the 'posthuman'. It outlines the genealogy of the various posthuman 'scenarios' in circulation and engages with their theoretical and philosophical assumptions and social and political implications. It does so by connecting the philosophical debate about the future of humanity with a range of texts, including examples from new media, popular culture, science and the media.
Download or read book Feed written by M. T. Anderson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains. Winner of the LA Times Book Prize. For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play around with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who knows something about what it’s like to live without the feed-and about resisting its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a brave new world - and a hilarious new lingo - sure to appeal to anyone who appreciates smart satire, futuristic fiction laced with humor, or any story featuring skin lesions as a fashion statement.
Download or read book The House of the Scorpion written by Nancy Farmer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newberry Honour Award Winner & National Book Award Winner. Matt is six years old when he discovers that he is different from other children and other people. To most, Matt isn't considered a boy at all, but a beast, dirty and disgusting. But to El Patron, lord of a country called Opium, Matt is the guarantee of eternal life. El Patron loves Matt as he loves himself - for Matt is himself. They share the exact same DNA. As Matt struggles to understand his existence and what that existence truly means, he is threatened by a host of sinister and manipulating characters, from El Patron's power-hungry family to the brain-deadened eejits and mindless slaves that toil Opium's poppy fields. Surrounded by a dangerous army of bodyguards, escape is the only chance Matt has to survive. But even escape is no guarantee of freedom . . . because Matt is marked by his difference in ways that he doesn't even suspect. Praise for The House of Scorpions: 'It's a pleasure to read science fiction that's full of warm, strong characters... that doesn't rely on violence as the solution to complex problems of right and wrong. It's a pleasure to read.' Ursula K. LeGuin 'Fabulous' Diana Wynne Jones Also by Nancy Farmer: The Sea of Trolls Land of the Silver Apples The Islands of the Blessed The Lord of Opium
Download or read book The Ship Who Sang written by Anne McCaffrey and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helva had been born human, but only her brain had been saved—saved to be schooled, programmed, and implanted into the sleek titanium body of an intergalactic scout ship. But first she had to choose a human partner—male or female—to share her exhilirating excapades in space! Her life was to be rich and rewarding . . . resplendent with daring adventures and endless excitement, beyond the wildest dreams of mere mortals. Gifted with the voice of an angel and being virtually indestructable, Helva XH-834 antipitated a sublime immortality. Then one day she fell in love!
Download or read book From Alice to Algernon written by Holly Virginia Blackford and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the late Victorian period, Charles Darwin's theories took the world by storm, and the impact of evolution on research into the developing human mind was impossible to overlook. Thereafter the study of children and childhood became a means to theorize, imagine, and apply the concept of evolution in a broad range of cultural productions. Beginning with the watershed Victorian era, From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel examines the creative transformation these theories underwent as they filtered through the modern novel, especially those that examined the mind of the child. By examining the connection between authors and trends in child psychology, author Holly Blackford explains why many modern novels began to focus on child cognition as a site for intellectual and artistic exploration. In each chapter of this book, select novels of the late-nineteenth or twentieth century are paired with a specific moment or movement from the history of developmental psychology. Novels such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Henry James's What Maisie Knew, or Radclyffe Hall's less-canonical The Well of Loneliness and even Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, showcase major questions about human epistemology through their child characters. From Lewis Carroll's Alice and her looking-glass to Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas and the murder of Mary Dalton to the chaotic Neverland--symbolizing the unmappable child's brain--a literary tradition of child consciousness has emerged as an experimental site for the unstable concepts of evolution, civilization, and development. By situating literature about children within concurrent psychological discourses, Blackford demonstrates how the modern novel contributed to the world's understanding of the boundless wonders and discernible limits of child consciousness. HOLLY BLACKFORD is a professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden. She is the author of Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls; Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee's Novel; The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature; and editor of 100 Years of Anne with an 'e': The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables and Something Complete and Great: The Centennial Study of My Ántonia.
Download or read book Pure written by Julianna Baggott and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-08 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . . Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run. Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . . There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her. When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.
Download or read book Classical Literature and Posthumanism written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.
Download or read book Gothic Remixed written by Megen de Bruin-Molé and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling genre of Frankenfiction sees classic literature turned into commercial narratives invaded by zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other fantastical monsters. Too engaged with tradition for some and not traditional enough for others, these 'monster mashups' are often criticized as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. These hybrid creations are the 'monsters' of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.
