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Ecoperformativity in Multivalent Textual Ecologies

Thesis Info

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Author

Mansoor, Asma

Program

PhD

Institute

National University of Modern Languages

City

Islamabad

Province

Islamabad

Country

Pakistan

Thesis Completing Year

2019

Thesis Completion Status

Completed

Subject

English Language & Literature

Language

English

Link

http://prr.hec.gov.pk/jspui/bitstream/123456789/11985/1/Asma%20Mansoor%20English%202019%20numl%20isb%20prr.pdf

Added

2021-02-17 19:49:13

Modified

2024-03-24 20:25:49

ARI ID

1676724647510

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Intervening within contemporary ecosophy, this thought experiment reframes the idea of the human while taking into account nonhuman semiotic potential. It postulates literary theory and texts as agents that participate in the material world’s meaningmaking tableau while subverting the nature/culture and human/nonhuman divides. Through a transdisciplinary itinerary, my work provides a much needed intervention within the field of literature as it foregrounds the narrative potential of nonhuman actants and its impact on the assumptions regarding the human body. Since stories have historically prescribed the centrality of the human as a logocentric agent, I argue that stories can also be used to dismantle this anthropocentric tilt. In so doing, they can establish the idea of a reparative humanness that takes into account the materialsemiotic agency of the world within which the human is enmeshed. Via the idea of textual ecology, I read the world as a kinetic compendium of human and nonhuman stories that defy absolutes and break down onto-epistemological enclosures. Therefore, my theorization takes on board Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, along with two hypertexts, i.e., Mark Amerika’s Grammatron and Stephanie Strickland & Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo’s V:Vniverse to propose a re-reading of the human in terms of a compound subjectivity. This compound subjectivity inaugurates a re-reading of human embodiment as an editable assemblage that is in a state of continual becoming due to its enmeshment with various nonhuman phenomena. Since the human body is no longer a fixed entity, human performativity is also equally malleable. Therefore, I propose the idea of Ecoperformativity, which invites a search for new stories regarding our understanding of the world we live in through their mediation with nonhuman narrative agency. In so doing, I have blended the pertinent tenets of Jacques Derrida, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Timothy Morton, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, etc. My research advocates the stance that in narrating more egalitarian performative accounts of human and nonhuman agency, literary texts and theories function as open-ended semiotic systems which permit a weaving of new stories regarding the co-constitutive participation of the human and nonhuman in the meaning-making processes of the world. This provides the space for the renewal of humanities that could raise further possibilities for thinking Posthuman subjectivities and the new structures of dominance that might emerge as a consequence.
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