| Inspired by contemporary questions of identity and one's place in the world, this project attempts to answer the following question: what does it means to be human in the twenty-first century? The form and possibility of the posthuman, the focal point of my research, place the human subject at a point in its evolution where it resides in a liminal space. The once rigid categories of human and machine, or human and animal, for example, meet at a transitional state between the two. The chapters of the dissertation examine different angles of the posthuman as it is represented in French literature and film, each chapter studying a specific iteration of the notion to propose an array of possibilities. The primary texts of this dissertation focus on Metropolitan French works to reveal that the journey toward the posthuman is on the minds of French writers and directors, and that there is evidence that steps are already being taken on the path to the posthuman. In La Possibilite d'une ile, Michel Houellebecq's neo-humans must encounter key human experiences like suffering in order to become posthuman. Jean-Dominique Bauby's Le Scaphandre et le papillon gives its audience a glimpse of the advantages of working to overcome the boundaries of the human as we have always known it. For the narrator of Tanguy Viel's Cinema, his obsession with the film Sleuth becomes a figurative labyrinth where he searches for meaning and becomes a pathway toward the posthuman. The author/narrator of Olivier Rolin's Suite a l'Hotel Crystal enjoys a flexibility to adapt and change as he travels the globe. The chapters of his novel communicate sensations of alienation and dehumanization, but there is also a freedom in the possibilities of identity that is less contained and unified. Ultimately, I propose that the human takes on a key role in its own journey toward the posthuman. No longer passive to the forces of nature or divine intervention, the human subject is an active agent that moves itself forward toward new opportunities in a posthuman future. |
