Human, All Too Human (Essays from the English Institute) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 041591499X ISBN 13: 9780415914994

Publisher: Routledge, 1996

Synopsis

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. Human, All Too Human considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism? Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. Human, All Too Human examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by things and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them. The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis

About this title

About the Author

Diana Fuss is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Essentially Speaking:Feminism, Nature and Difference and IdentificationPapers, both published by Routledge.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 041591499X
• ISBN 13: 9780415914994
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Fuss Diana