Toward a Poetics of Posthumanist Narrative Using Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

Abstract

In the Anthropocene, social identities have become globally technologized, mediatized, and medicalized more than ever before, so “ordinary” people become complicit in forms of becoming detrimental to their well-being, but profitable for a few. In this article, I argue that Posthumanist narratives use various discursive strategies to generate shifts in readers that form, or bring to consciousness, a sense of already being Posthuman. Part one locates the novel in relation to critical posthumanism, and part two explicates the narrative devices that facilitate critical posthuman consciousness. Part three offers brief thoughts about how to more fully explore critical posthumanist narrative because this article is but a step toward thinking about what may be relevant to Posthumanist narrative practices. Indeed, it is arguably appropriate for Posthumanism to remain “dynamic and shifting” (Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism” 17) as it seeks to retain an openness and receptivity to many ways of becoming and many ways of “doing.”