Encouraging ‘children of the compost’: in search of a posthuman theory of character

Abstract

This paper interrogates the humanist commitment in pedagogical ideas circulating around the act of creating character and the related judgements which underlie workshop criticism. It considers how many pedagogical texts, and much practice, reinforce the centrality of an individual subject who is separate not only from objects and environment, but from other subjects: technological, human and nonhuman. Whilst acknowledging the challenge to these notions already arising from the textuality of postmodernism it questions the theory of character these challenges have produced and considers what a posthuman theory of character might look like, drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of humanity as ‘compost’ and utilising The Overstory by Richard Powers as an example. The paper considers how student writers could be encouraged to move beyond humanist notions of the individual and to write into the connected realm of the posthuman.

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