Posthumanism and the Decentring of the Human Subject in Contemporary Fiction

Table of Contents P osthumanist thought subjects the sovereign human subject of liberal humanism to sustained critical pressure, revealing that subject as a historically contingent construction whose privileged position has rested upon hierarchical relations with animals, machines, environments, and those human populations relegated to the margins of full subject status. Contemporary fiction participates in this critical operation by elaborating narrative forms that redistribute agency, interiority, and epistemic authority beyond the confines of the autonomous human individual. Through the formal and thematic decentring of the human, literary representation renders visible the multi-species, technological, and material entanglements that constitute existence, thereby aligning imaginative practice with an ontology of becoming oriented toward the progressive displacement of unjustified hierarchical privilege. The present essay examines the theoretical coordinates of posthumanist decentrin…