ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the critical landscape, from the linguistic turn of postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Jameson, Lyotard, and others) to the social determinism and eliminationist rhetoric of posthumanism (Fanon, Braidotti, Harroway, Weisman, Land, and others), that has led us to what Neema Parvini calls the “anti-humanism” of recent scholarship. It tells a story, of a kind, taking a reader through a narrative of “fragmentation” of the self, “fragmentation” in scholarship and theory, “fragmentation” in religion, and then introduces thinkers like Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who are interested, not in fragmentation, but in integration, in wholeness, convergence, and/or return (in)to the Other. The chapter then introduces the paradigm of transcendence and previews how that will be relevant to the literary works to be discussed in subsequent chapters.
