scholarly journals Children of Oryx, Children of Crake, Children of Men: Redefining the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s “ustopian” MaddAddam Trilogy

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Eduardo Marks de Marques
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
The Human Condition

One of the main pillars of posthuman and transhuman thought is the use of technology as a means to ameliorate human life by helping overcome the flaws and limitations of the biological body. The effect of such trends has been central to the development of contemporary, third-turn dystopian novels in English, published in the past thirty or so years. However, one important aspect of such narratives is also their list of transgressive characteristics, distancing them from their modern, second-turn counterparts. The following article aims to discuss how transgressive the ideas of dystopia and transhumanism that form Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy are, essentially discussing whatever lies at the core of the human condition.

Beyond Realism

Renascence ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ascari ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Human Condition

A complex and controversial novel, Atonement is at the core of a lively critical debate, opposing those who focus on the impossibility of Briony’s atonement – also in relation to the author’s atheist views – to those who conversely explore the redemptive quality of her “postlapsarian” painful self-fashioning. Far from concerning simply the destiny of a literary character, this debate has to do with the impact Postmodernist relativism has on both the conception of the human subject and the discourses of the past, from memory to history and fiction. Discarding any potentially nihilistic interpretations of Atonement as disempowering, this article delves into Ian McEwan’s multi-layered text in order to comprehend its ambivalences, its subtle investigation of the human condition, and its status as a postmemory novel reconnecting us to the events of World War Two.

Compassion and Peregrinatio

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Joshua Hordern
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter begins to describe the response to Chapter 1’s diagnosis. The core of a social theory which will provide therapy is introduced, namely, peregrinatio, the wayfaring and pilgrim experience of life. Peregrinatio is explained and deployed to show how it reframes healthcare encounters, illuminating the nature of compassion, its civic context, and its everyday practice and fostering six attitudes which conduce to compassion: (i) interest in the human life-course; (ii) patience with plurality of perspective; (iii) curiosity in human encounter and companionship; (iv) humility in conversation; (v) recognition of the proper value of healthcare; and (vi) perseverance in preserving the communal nature of human life amidst suffering. The benefits of such a framing of the human condition for three aspects of healing are considered: (i) the healing of the affections; (ii) the healing encounter with God amidst suffering; and (iii) the healing role of healthcare professionals. Objections to peregrinatio are considered and addressed.

Time Flows, the Child Plays

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Michalski
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
With Memory ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter introduces the images of the grazing cows, the child at play, and the person observing them with envy and emotion. It argues that these images are supposed to confront us with human life, concentrated in the lived moment and simultaneously tearing the past from the future. It is life stretched out from “yesterday” to “tomorrow” and thereby burdened with memory and guilt—and at the same time innocent and oblivious, growing out of time in its every instant: the connection between time and its sickness, eternity. Such a concept of the human condition, the chapter shows, carries far-reaching consequences.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

An Answer to a Question that Cannot Be Answered: A Pragmatist Approach to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s Theoretical Perspectives on Humor

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Jarno Hietalahti
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Future ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Pragmatist Philosophy ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article offers a pragmatist approach to concentration camp humor, in particular, to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s conceptualizations of humor. They both show how humor does not vanish even in the worst imaginable circumstances. Despite this similarity, it will be argued that their intellectual positions on humor differ significantly. The main difference between the two authors is that according to Frankl, humor is elevating in the middle of suffering, and according to Levi, humor expresses the absurdity of the idea of concentration camps, but this is not necessarily a noble reaction. Through a critical synthesis based on pragmatist philosophy, it will be claimed that humor in concentration camps expresses the human condition in the entirely twisted situation. This phenomenon cannot be understood without considering forms of life, how drastic the changes from the past were, and what people expected from the future, if anything.

Technic Self-Determination

2014 ◽  
pp. 203-224
Author(s):  
Franco Cortese
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Will ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
Enhancement Technologies ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter addresses concerns that the development and proliferation of Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) will be (a) dehumanizing and a threat to human dignity and (b) a threat to our autonomy and sovereignty as individuals. Contrarily, HET can be shown to constitute the most effective foreseeable means of increasing the autonomy and sovereignty of individual members of society. Furthermore, this chapter elaborates the position that the use of HET exemplifies—and indeed even intensifies—our most human capacity and faculty, namely the desire for increased self-determination (i.e., control over the determining circumstances and conditions of our own selves and lives), which is referred to as the will toward self-determination. Based upon this position, arguably, the use of HET bears fundamental ontological continuity with the human condition in general and with the historically ubiquitous will toward self-determination in particular as it is today and has been in the past. HET will not be a dehumanizing force, but will rather serve to increase the very capacity and characteristic that characterizes us as human more accurately than anything else.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The World ◽  
Subjective Truth ◽  
The Human Condition

Introduces some of the central ideas of existentialism—including subjective truth, finitude, being-in-the-world, facticity, transcendence, inwardness, and the self as becoming—as relevant to an individual living in the contemporary moment. Highlights existentialist concern both for human individuality and for commonly-shared features of the human condition. Emphasizes existentialist attention both to the despairing aspects of human life and to the affirmation of existence as worthy of wonder. Introduces a few key thinkers—Kierkegaard, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche—while also indicating the diversity of existentialism to be emphasized throughout the book. Addresses what existentialism may have to offer in the context of contemporary challenges to objective truth and communal forms of meaning.

“Before the Word and World became Separate”

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Joe Moffett
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
The Core ◽  
Intended Destination ◽  
The Human Condition

There is in Charles Wright’s work a complicated spiritual quest that frequently turns to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Wright’s reappearing “pilgrim” persona, who, unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, never arrives at his intended destination, persists in a stubborn search for divine insight. Wright uses Hopkins as a sounding board, both in the sense of testing his own spiritu- ality against Hopkins’s and the sense of experimenting with Hopkins’s very sounds. Wright marvels at his predecessor’s ability to combine world, word, and Word; he often attempts, and fails, to do the same, coming to believe that language has become severed from its spiritual origins, but in exploring that rift, which Wright often does in Hopkinsian terms, the poet “burrows deep into the core of the human condition” and achieves a gravity unlike that of any other contemporary poet.

Robots and the Future of Retribution

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-101
Author(s):  
John Danaher
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter studies the future of retribution and, in particular, the role that robots will play in shaping that future. It begins by describing the Bouphonia ritual, which speaks to two important features of the human condition: the enduring significance of practices of blame and punishment in human life, and the occasional absurdity of this desire. What happens when robots — or other sophisticated artificially intelligent (AI) machines — get embedded in our societies and have a part to play in criminal acts? Should they, like the knife in the Bouphonia ritual, be blamed for their contribution? Or should something else happen, something a little more radical? The chapter makes the case for radicalism. In particular, it suggests that the rise of the robots should lead us to reconsider the wisdom of our traditional practices of punishment and blame.

An Americanist's Take on Against the Grain

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-699
Author(s):  
Terence N. D'Altroy
Keyword(s):  
Social Complexity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Food Sources ◽  
Human History ◽  
Formal Institutions ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
The Human Condition

In both public and professional accounts of the grand sweep of human history, a few questions recurrently beg for attention. How did technology—broadly understood to encompass everything from control of fire to domestication of food sources, to craft manufacture, to communication and transportation—transform human life? How did social complexity come into being: e.g. classes, formal institutions and the state? Why did some ancient societies invest so much effort in corporate constructions such as pyramids, temples and other monumental architecture? What were the effects of warfare and disease on the human condition? And why did the early societies of so many regions cycle between eras of concentrated power and its apparent dissolution?

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document