Posthumanism and the Nonhuman Voice in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

This article examines how contemporary fiction decentres the human through nonhuman narrators and posthumanist form, situating recent novels within the theoretical convergence of posthumanism, new materialism, and "unnatural" narratology. Through readings of four recent novels that adopt artificial and ecological points of view, it argues that the nonhuman voice does not so much grant access to nonhuman experience as stage, reflexively, the impossibility of such access. Bringing posthumanist and new-materialist theory into contact with the narrative theory of impossible and nonhuman narration, the article contends that these texts perform what might be called a calibrated anthropomorphism: they deploy human language and cognitive schemas to evoke the nonhuman while making readers feel the seams of that projection. The artificial and ecological voices examined here are not transparent windows onto other minds but mirrors that know themselves to be mirrors. The essay proposes that this productive failure constitutes both the aesthetic achievement and the ethical force of posthumanist fiction, relocating the genre's significance from representation to the dramatised limit of representation itself.