The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterises lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, post-industrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

About the Author

Colleen McQuillen is associate professor in the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has authored numerous publications on Russian literature and culture, including The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature and Costumes in Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013).

Julia Vaingurt is associate professor in the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published widely on Russian modernism and avant-garde, including Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and Arts in Russia of the 1920s (Northwestern University Press, 2013).

Reviews
"The Human Reimagined is an unassuming but essential volume. It's a minor form - the edited collection of academic essays - that undertakes the major work of rearticulating a field of philosophical and political inquiry. The editors and contributors present a vision of a powerful theoretical and philosophical concept of the human based in the material reality of history. It's that materialist grounding and that range that give posthumanism - and The Human Reimagined - its radical potential." - LA Review of Books



Book Information
ISBN 9781618117793
Author Colleen McQuillen
Format Paperback
Page Count 278
Imprint Academic Studies Press
Publisher Academic Studies Press