Tanel Lepsoo

Raili Marling

Sara Bédard-Goulet

Today’s world is characterized by a pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty. This has created an increasingly urgent set of questions about who counts as human today and the nature of meaningful human life. Although the human impact on earth is as visible as ever, we can no longer take the centrality of the human for granted. This tension is at the center of this volume, which engages with ontological theories of posthumanism and new materialism, combining them with poststructuralist theories of power and subjectivity to create a comprehensive matrix for diagnosing the present. Within this framework, the authors discuss American and French novels and French-language plays that offer an insight into today’s diverse challenges to being human. They consider the impact of neoliberalism on shaping human affects and intimacies, as well as literary responses to socio-economic precarity. The current environmental catastrophe is tackled through novels that question the human responsibility in bringing about, for example, the sixth mass extinction of species and the anthropocentricity of literature itself. The art and artificiality of theater are shown to be means that allow us to delve into the extremes of human experience, for example, by revisiting myths that re-interpret desire and question the possibility of a future for human beings.

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