The Human Reimagined : Posthumanism in Russia

Examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterizes lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, postindustrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

Contributors include: Alex Anikina, Keti Chukhrov, Jacob Emery, Elana Gomel, Sofya Khagi, Katerina Lakhmitko, Colleen McQuillen, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Kristina Toland, Julia Vaingurt, Diana Kurkovsky West, Trevor Wilson