Fresh Snow on a Fallen Tree: The Work of Elegy in a Posthumanist World.

摘要

The liberal human subject, the mainstay of humanist discourse over the past two centuries, has been under assault by posthuman critics since the advent of anti- and post-humanism in the middle of the century. Posthuman critics suggest that humans exist as an embodiment of a set of biological and ideological constructs known as human, but elegiac poets work to construct and sustain the human against this discourse.;This dissertation critiques the construction of human subjectivity in elegies from the nineteenth and twentieth century through the lens of genre criticism, paying close attention to how traditional elegiac tropes are adapted and revised to sustain a humanist point of view. Close readings of nineteenth-century elegies examine how these poets write the autonomous human subject in their elegies, and then attempt to sustain this discourse when this subject is threatened by the advent of proto-posthumanist ideas. Early twentieth-century elegists struggle to maintain a humanist view within their elegies, and manage to do so by either satirizing Romantic pastoral elegiac forms, or reverting to classical elegiac tropes. Postmodern elegists highlight an essentialist view of the human in their elegies, and thus recover the human in an increasingly posthuman age.