New Human in Literature

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor with Special Responsibilities in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature (2008), The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society (2013), and the editor of several volumes, including World Literature: A Reader (2012) and The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012). He is a member of the Academia Europaea and an advisory board member of the Institute for World Literature.

• Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1 The Triune Human1 A Systemic View of the Human 2 An Emerging Cultural History of the Twentieth Century3 History, Technique, Imagination4 The New Human and the Medium of LiteraturePart 2 Self-modernization5 Virginia Woolf 6 William Carlos Williams 7 Louis-Ferdinand Céline Part 3 The Grand Projects 8 Chinua Achebe 9 Mo Yan 10 Orhan Pamuk Part 4 The Final Frontier 11 Literature as Lab 12 Don DeLillo 13 Michel Houellebecq Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Both a meditation on the status of literature and on that of the human, this book has the tact to treat these two concerns as parallel, but related - not identical. The result is a salutary reminder of the fragility of all "autopoiesis." The New Human in Literature shows how indispensable to ideas of species identity and culture the technological imagination has always been.