| "Auxiliary Organs: Modernity and the Prosthetic Relation" investigates a prosthetic line of thinking within modernity. Beyond providing insight into this newly mediated and technologized landscape, this project examines how the prosthesis has come to influence conceptions of the human within modernity. Responding to representations of the prosthesis in twentieth-century Anglophone literature and contemporary writing, this dissertation considers how the human has come to be understood with respect to the non-human: those animate, inanimate, and prosthetic entities that are both extra-human and intrinsically linked to what we call the human. As this dissertation argues, technology, industry, and the developing study of human evolution would lead to changing conceptions of the human within modernity---conceptions that still influence the ways in which we think about subjecthood. |
