Journal article
Cyrano's Posthuman Moon: Comic Inversions and Animist Relations
Symposium (Syracuse), Vol.69(4), pp.214-227
10/02/2015
DOI: 10.1080/00397709.2015.1100510
Abstract
Seventeenth-century comic writer Cyrano de Bergerac's fictional journeys to the moon (L'Autre Monde) and to the sun (Les Etats et Empires du Soleil) include critiques of humanism and human exceptionalism that can be usefully recontextualized within twenty-first-century theoretical discourses related to ecocriticism and posthumanism. Cyrano's main weapons in his satirical attack on humanism include the critique of anthropocentrism; a poetics of misanthropy that also leads to a revitalizing rediscovery of human animality; images of hybridity and monstrosity; human/nonhuman interconnections and interactions; the personhood of animals and plants; animist materialization of natural environments and atmosphere; materialist relativism; and comic inversion. Though Cyrano's concerns were vastly different from our own, his works of early modern science fiction nonetheless resonate with the problems that define the anthropocene. The freedom of early modern comic fiction thus usefully informs the present-day era of environmental crisis with unexpected insights into humanity's existence on earth.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Cyrano's Posthuman Moon: Comic Inversions and Animist Relations
- Creators
- Roland Racevskis - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Symposium (Syracuse), Vol.69(4), pp.214-227
- Publisher
- Routledge
- DOI
- 10.1080/00397709.2015.1100510
- ISSN
- 0039-7709
- eISSN
- 1931-0676
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/02/2015
- Academic Unit
- Liberal Arts and Science Admin; International Programs; French and Italian
- Record Identifier
- 9984398031902771
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