Browse Book and Journal Content on Project MUSE
OR
“There will be a new embodiment, in a new way”: Alternative Posthumanisms in Women in Love

From: Journal of Modern Literature
Volume 36, Number 3, Spring 2013
pp. 120-137 | 10.1353/jml.2013.0024

Abstract

Abstract:

This essay places Women in Love in dialogue with posthumanism in order to understand what kind of a nonhuman world the novel might be imagining when Rupert Birkin declares that “ humanity is a dead letter,” and when characters alternately degrade and idealize what they identify as the inhuman, superhuman, or extra-human. I argue that Lawrence’s array of prefixes does not graft easily onto the “post” of posthumanism, and that Women in Love constantly invokes, but never settles on a definitive answer to Katherine Hayles’s question: “What kind of posthumans will we be?” Instead, the novel enacts a series of alternative posthumanisms that, through their vexed encodings of the human and humanist, direct us to reflect on the merits and limitations of our own contemporary theorizations.



Access your Project MUSE content using one of the login options below

Shibboleth

Shibboleth authentication is only available to registered institutions.

Project MUSE

Research Areas

Recommend

  • You have access to this content
  • Free sample
  • Open Access
  • Restricted Access