Time Works Without Humans Too: A Posthumanist Reading of Literary Time Through Physics

Abstract

As we become aware of our increasing entanglement with non-human others, through accelerating technologization and the threats of environmental disasters, the arts and those that study them have started to redefine the human. Moving away from the supremacist and essentialist narratives of humanism, scholars like Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Cary Wolfe try to take the human out of its imaginary position in the centre of the universe and reconstruct them as embodied creatures in the material world to create a new inclusive and affirmative ethics. Although literature is well-suited to portray these posthumanist ideas, a study of literary time, which has traditionally been seen as an imitation of the general human experience of time, is still lacking within the context of posthumanism. This thesis explores how literary time can be read in a posthumanist way, using theories from modern physics, in particular the general theory of relativity and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. By means of a close reading of the novels The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut, The Time of Our Singing (2004) by Richard Powers and Anatomy of a Soldier (2016) by Harry Parker and a comparison of these novels with the physics theories, I argue that literary representations of the non-humanist time structures described in modern physics can contribute to posthumanist meaning-making and subject formation in novels that might otherwise not be read, or not as strongly, as posthumanist.