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Posthuman Nurturing In American Literary Futurities, Andrew Ryan Tolle

English Dissertations

This dissertation applies posthuman theories to the concept of nurture in American literatures of 1880-1920 and 1980-2020 to explore how writers construct and imagine futurities that increasingly critique the liberal Cartesian human. While relationships between “subjects” and “objects” in Cartesian dualism can render the act of nurturing both problematic and violent, posthuman nurture decenters the nurturer, shifting focus onto the nurtured. This allows us to view nurture as an inherently mutual act that includes agencies beyond humans, including animals, plants, and other non-zoe. American literatures of 1880-1920, which often speculated futures taking place in 1980-2020, exhibit nascent strains of the …