Posthumanism and Phenomenology: The Focus on the Modern Condition of Boredom, Solitude, Loneliness and Isolation

ISBN-13: 9783031104138 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 211 str.

Calley A. Hornbuckle; Jadwiga S. Smith; William S. Smith

Opis

This volume investigates the intersection of phenomenology and posthumanism by rethinking the human and nonhuman specifically with regard to boredom, isolation, loneliness, and solitude.  By closely examining these concepts from phenomenological, philosophical, and literary perspectives, this diverse collection of essays offers insights into the human and nonhuman in the absence of the Other and within the postapocalyptic. Topics of interest include modalities of presence and absence with regard to body, time, beast, and things; the phenomenology of corporeity; ontopoiesis and the sublime; alienation, absurdity, and phenomenology of existence; memory, posthistoricity, posthuman nihilism, and posthumanity; speculative cosmology, cosmic holism, and consciousness; ecophenomenology; and the philosophy of the aesthetic.  These essays parse and probe distinct aspects of the posthuman condition and what it means to exist in a posthuman world, thereby furthering the vast, rich scope of phenomenological research and study.  This text appeals to students and researchers working in these topics and fields.

Spis treści

 Part I Boredom, Temporality, Transhumanity

1.The Treatment of Boredom in Heidegger and Insomnia in Levinas

Jadwiga S. Smith  

2.Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Common Telos of the All

Randolph Dible

3.From Boredom to a Posthumanist Fulfillment

Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith

4.Experiencing Boredom: A Phenomenological Analysis

Tõnu Viik

Part II The Body / Technology / Ecology

5.Sloterdijk and Heidegger on the Question of Humanism

Fiachra Long

6.On The Growing Solitude of the Body 

Marie Antonios Sassine

7.Somatic Dissection and the Journey of Being-Animal

Roberto Marchesini

8.“Strange Kinship”: Romantic-Era Women Writers and the Posthuman

Calley Hornbuckle

Part III Body, Culture and Society

9.The Distance of the Exotic: Bullough’s Idea of Psychical Distance from the Perspective of Levinas’s Concept of the Aesthetic

Miloš Ševčík 

10.Torture Acts: Inclusion and Exclusion in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

Abigail Hess

11.Humor and Amusement Based on Incongruities: A Dialectical Approach

Anna Małecka

Part IV A Shrinking World

12.The Meaning of Solitude/Loneliness/Isolation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

Tony E. Afejuku

13.Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s “diminishing boundaries of a shrinking world” in “Heraclitus’ Golden River” from Wild (2012)

Rosemary Gray

Part V Narrative and Solitude

14.Death and the Absence of Others: A Narratological Investigation of Death and Solitude

John N. Balsavich

Part VI Aesthetics and Ontology

15.An Apology for Abstraction in an Age of High Definition and Photo Realism in the Work of Kandinsky and The White Shaman Rock Art Panel and Related Rock Art Sites

Bruce Ross

16.On Tragic Feeling and Human Weakness

Victor G. Rivas López

O autorze

Calley A. Hornbuckle is an Associate Professor of English in the School of Liberal Arts at Dalton State College, Georgia. Her scholarship focuses on British women writers and the environmental tradition.

She has published on Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility and presented several papers on ecological intelligence in the works of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Beatrix Potter. Currently, she is investigating Mary Robinson’s investigations of ethics, ethology, and aesthetics in light of recent developments in neuroscience and embedded cognition. She also serves as an executive editor for The Explicator.

Dr. Hornbuckle has presented at the World Phenomenology Institute on numerous occasions.

Jadwiga S. Smith is emerita Professor of English at Bridgewater State University where she has worked for 32 years. She earned two master’s degrees in European and Slavic literatures from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where she developed an early interest in phenomenology. Graduate studies took Dr. Smith to Duquesne University, where she earned a Ph.D. in English literature; she wrote her

dissertation on the phenomenology of Roman In garden and its application to the stage play. She has continued to publish countless scholarly articles on phenomenology, literary theory, and drama in the Analecta Husserliana, the Phenomenological Inquiry, and other journals.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Smith began working with Dr. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and became a major collaborator in the World Phenomenology Institute. After Dr. Tymieniecka’s death, Dr. Smith became the WPI President for the American Division. She continues this important work today, organizing and administering conferences, conducting and leading conferences, and editing volumes of the

Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Dr. Smith remains a vital, enthusiastic, inspiring link in the World Phenomenology Institute where she encourages younger scholars to pursue phenomenological studies.

William S. Smith is emeritus Professor of English and Dean of the College of Graduate Studies at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he worked for 30 plus years. Graduating from Duquesne University with a Ph.D. in English literature, he has spent 40 years in higher education. Dr. Smith’s scholarly interests and areas of specialization include nineteenth-century British

literature, particularly the poetry of William Wordsworth and the Gerard Manley Hopkins. Of particular interest are the epistemological traditions extending across the poetic landscape of the nineteenth century. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Phenomenological Inquiry and the Analecta Husserliana.

Dr. Smith’s relationship with the World Phenomenology Institute began in the mid-1980s and continues today as the Executive President of the WPI. These administrative responsibilities are many, including managing the WPI staff, organizing conferences, administering funding sources, and editing the Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research.