Fantasies of Self-Mourning
Subtitle: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite
Publisher: BRILL; Brill/Rodopi; Brill | Rodopi
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
ISBN-13: 9789004390348
Subjects: Modernism (literature); Death in literature
Description: In 'Fantasies of Self-Mourning' Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O'Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Bela Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body-or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.