ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture, although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity. The multiplicity of nonhuman existence and phenomena is, in its various forms, constantly represented, reimagined, and even remade across the stories and figures of contemporary culture, and humans coming into contact with these stories and figures must themselves become reconfigured through the processes of interpretation and engagement. The chapter connects posthumanist concerns to the entire range of contemporary culture and, in doing so, test the transmedial (and trans-species) usefulness of the current theories and methods of literary and cultural research. It analyzes the ways in which literary texts, texts’ “literariness”, and literary theory could rethink or reopen ethical and political questions about the human, the nonhuman, and the posthuman in varying communicative and aesthetic contexts.
