Post humanist textuality: Theoretical foundation and development
Downloads
Abstract
Posthumanism has emerged as a critical theoretical framework that challenges anthropocentric assumptions and redefines the understanding of subjectivity, agency, and textual interpretation in contemporary literary and cultural studies. By interrogating the traditional privileging of the human subject, posthumanist theory reconfigures the relationship between humans, technology, machines, animals, and material environments, thereby reshaping the concept of textuality. This paper examines posthuman textuality through major theoretical perspectives and influential theorists, emphasizing the transformation of texts from stable, author-centered entities into dynamic, interconnected, and technologically mediated sites of meaning production. Drawing on the contributions of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Bruno Latour, and Cary Wolfe, the study investigates how posthumanism expands textual interpretation beyond human-centered epistemologies toward hybrid, relational, and multispecies frameworks. It further explores the role of digital technologies, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and networked systems in redefining textual meaning and authorship. The paper argues that posthuman textuality destabilizes fixed meanings and singular interpretative authority by foregrounding the interaction between human and nonhuman agencies. Ultimately, the study highlights the significance of posthuman textuality in broadening literary criticism and cultural analysis within technologically evolving societies.
Keywords:
artificial intelligence contemporary literary criticism cultural theory digital textuality literary theory human–machine interaction posthuman textualityReferences
Abblitt, S. (2019). A postdigital paradigm in literary studies. Higher Education Research & Development, 38, 109 - 97. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1541313
Ağın, B. (2022). Spread the word: mattertext as bio-art. European Journal of English Studies, 26, 439 - 461. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2022.2148403
Ağın, B., & Yılmaz, Z. G. (2025). Introduction: Towards an Ecological Posthumanism in English Studies. English Studies, 106, 647 - 655. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2025.2529326
Allen, S. (2019). The Unbounded Gatherer: Possibilities for posthuman writing-reading. Scandinavian Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2018.07.001
Allen, S. (2019). The Unbounded Gatherer: Possibilities for posthuman writing-reading. Scandinavian Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2018.07.001
Alonso, M. A. (2024). El cuerpo como distopía: un análisis poshumano de la obra de Nee Barros. Moderna Språk. https://doi.org/10.58221/mosp.v118i2.28336
Badmington, N. (2000). Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Barthes, R. (1975). The pleasure of the text (R. Miller, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.
Braidotti, R. (2017). Critical Posthuman Knowledges. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116, 83-96. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3749337
Braidotti, R. (2019). A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36, 31 - 61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486
Burriss, S. K., & Leander, K. (2024). Critical Posthumanist Literacy: Building Theory for Reading, Writing, and Living Ethically with Everyday Artificial Intelligence. Reading Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.565
Burriss, S. K., & Leander, K. (2024). Critical Posthumanist Literacy: Building Theory for Reading, Writing, and Living Ethically with Everyday Artificial Intelligence. Reading Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.565
Clarke, B. (2022). Posthuman Metamorphosis. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823292394
Cord, F. (2022). Posthumanist Cultural Studies: Taking the Nonhuman Seriously. Open Cultural Studies, 6, 25 - 37. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0138
Dedeoğlu, Ç., & Zampaki, N. (2023). Posthumanism for Sustainability: A Scoping Review. Journal of Posthumanism. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v3i1.2761
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dydrov, A. A. (2024). Apologetics and Criticism of Posthumanism (Review). Journal of Frontier Studies. https://doi.org/10.46539/jfs.v9i2.594
Elstermann, A. (2020). Computer-Generated Text as a Posthuman Mode of Literature Production. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.627
Falcon, J. (2022). Toward a critical posthuman geography. Cultural Geographies, 30, 19 - 34. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221110579
Fernaeus, Y. (2026). Bringing Theory Back Home: Revisiting the Pre-Millennial Legacy of Posthumanism in Interaction Design. Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3798513
Fernández-Götz, M., Gardner, A., De Liaño, G. D., & Harris, O. (2021). Posthumanism in Archaeology: An Introduction. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 31, 455 - 459. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774321000135
Ferrández-Sanmiguel, M., Muñoz-González, E., & Laguarta-Bueno, C. (2024). Introduction: ‘Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture’. European Journal of American Culture. https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00123_2
Forlano, L. (2017). Posthumanism and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3, 16-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1977). What is an author? In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews (pp. 113–138). Cornell University Press.
Gourlay, L. (2019). Textual Practices as Already-Posthuman: Re-Imagining Text, Authorship and Meaning- Making in Higher Education. Posthumanism and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-14672-6_14
Govinden, B. (2021). In search of reciprocity: Feminist challenges in Posthumanist thinking – An intellectual meditation. Agenda, 36, 43 - 53. https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2021.2013120
Gumanay, J. C. (2023). More Human Than Human: Posthumanism In Literary Discourse. International Journal of Humanity Studies (IJHS). https://doi.org/10.24071/ijhs.v7i1.6265
Gumanay, J. C. (2023). More Human Than Human: Posthumanism In Literary Discourse. International Journal of Humanity Studies (IJHS). https://doi.org/10.24071/ijhs.v7i1.6265
Haraway, D. J. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). Routledge.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N. K. (2008). Electronic literature: New horizons for the literary. University of Notre Dame Press.
Hennessy, R. (2021). Encouraging ‘children of the compost’: in search of a posthuman theory of character. New Writing, 19, 38 - 49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2021.1891260
Jansen, Y., Leeuwenkamp, J., & Urricelqui, L. (2021). Posthumanism and the ‘posterizing impulse’. Post- everything. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526148179.00020
Karthiyayini, S., & Pavithra, B. (2025). Interwoven Realities: Posthumanism and the Blurring of Boundaries in Select Literary Narratives. Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature. https://doi.org/10.66121/7ccwjp62
Kim, A. L. (2020). Writing after the Human: Marie Darrieussecq’s and Anne Garréta’s Posthumanisms. 20th & 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. https://doi.org/10.32873/unl.dc.ffsc.025
Kriman, A. (2023). Posthumanism and Сontemporary Art: Reassembling the Anthropocentric Discourse in the Visual Space. The Art and Science of Television. https://doi.org/10.30628/1994- 9529-2023-19.3-21-41
Kuby, C. R. (2017). Why a paradigm shift of ‘more than human ontologies’ is needed: putting to work poststructural and posthuman theories in writers’ studio. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30, 877 - 896. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1336803
Lamb, G., & Higgins, C. (2020). Posthumanism and Its Implications for Discourse Studies. 350-370. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108348195.017
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology (C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf, Trans.). Basic Books.
Lovell, S. (2018). Toward a Poetics of Posthumanist Narrative Using Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59, 57 - 74. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1360834
Mishra, D. (2022). The Future of the Literary Text in the Posthuman Condition. International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.22161/ijels.73.11
Nayar, P. K. (2014). Posthumanism. Polity Press.
Noteboom, J. (2021). Posthumanism and the digital university: texts, bodies and materialities. Learning, Media and Technology, 46, 366 - 367. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1920977
Noteboom, J. (2021). Posthumanism and the digital university: texts, bodies and materialities. Learning, Media and Technology, 46, 366 - 367. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1920977
O'Halloran, K. (2023). Posthumanist stylistics. Language and Literature, 32, 129 - 162. https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221140693
O'Halloran, K. (2023). Posthumanist stylistics. Language and Literature, 32, 129 - 162. https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221140693
Panigrahi, G., & Padhi, A. (2026). What does it mean “human” in the age of AI? A bibliometric evidence of posthumanism’s evolution, thematic structures, and future directions. Journal of Documentation. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-11-2025-0344
S, S.S., & Dharani, R. (2026). Beyond the Death of the Author: Posthuman Authorship and AI in Death of an Author. International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 11(2), 433–436. https://doi.org/10.22161/ijels.112.72
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). Duckworth. (Original work published 1916)
Schneider, B., & Heyd, T. (2024). Introduction: Unthinking Language from a Posthumanist Perspective. Signs and Society, 12, 1 - 13. https://doi.org/10.1086/728243
Schneider, B., & Heyd, T. (2024). Introduction: Unthinking Language from a Posthumanist Perspective. Signs and Society, 12, 1 - 13. https://doi.org/10.1086/728243
Siffrinn, N. E., & Coda, J. (2024). A literature review of posthumanist and new materialist research in applied linguistics. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 22, 190 - 201. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2024.2415619
Sosnowska, M., & Sawyer, R. (2022). Introduction: Jan Kott and Posthumanist Entanglements. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.24.01
Townsend, K. (2024). Screening the Posthuman, by Missy Molloy, Pansy Duncan, and Claire Henry. Alphaville: journal of film and screen media. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.20
Ulmer, J. (2017). Posthumanism as research methodology: inquiry in the Anthropocene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30, 832 - 848. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1336806
Utku, S. B., Dedeoğlu, Ç., Kümbet, P., & Tuncel, Y. (2021). Posthumanisms beyond Disciplines. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.33182/jp.v1i1.1510
Veljović, J. A. (2019). Posthumanism as a Mode of Problematization and Enhancement of Humanism. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v14i2.9
Veljović, J. A. (2019). Posthumanism as a Mode of Problematization and Enhancement of Humanism. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v14i2.9
Wilde, P., & Sylvia, J. J. (2024). Introduction: Posthumanism and Media Studies. Journal of Posthumanism. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v4i3.3451
Wilson, K. D., & Jeevaraj, A. E. (2023). Philosophical posthumanism: A renewed worldview and a methodological framework for critical analysis. Journal of Posthuman Studies, 7(2), 170–190. https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.7.2.0170
Wolfe, C. (2010). What is posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press.
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Sukhmanpreet Kaur
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
