Advancing Medical Posthumanism through Twenty-First Century American Poetry
Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry places contemporary poetics in dialogue with biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice.
This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social and natural environment, shaping their capacity to act, think, and feel. Contemporary American poetry is specifically poised to develop a pathway toward a posthuman intervention in biomedicine, the field of medical humanities, medical discourse, and the value systems that guide U.S. healthcare in general.
In challenging the liberal humanist viewpoint that places the human in a position of mastery and control, poets such as Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Brian Teare, Sam Sax, and Franny Choi, inspire us to rethink health, illness, and the culture of medicine.
Praise for Advancing Medical Posthumanism
“This rare book demonstrates why the (post)humanities are relevant to contemporary life; they bring together disciplines, such as ecology and medicine, that suffer from having been ripped apart. Advancing Medical Posthumanism reveals the fragile nature of our multispecies existence, and encourages us to confront the limitations of our own thinking about self, other, health, and life.”
—Lucinda Cole, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Department of English and Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment
“Through treating the poem as an object and examining poems as bodies, Tana Jean Welch contributes to the necessary move towards a medical posthumanism and offers insightful readings that consider the relationships between poetry, healthcare, the environment, and what it means to be posthuman. Welch's book is one of the first to explore the intersections between posthumanism and medical humanities, and is therefore a crucial intervention.”
—Anna McFarlane, Lecturer in Medical Humanities, University of Leeds, author of Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades
“Welch’s prescient readings of contemporary poetry through the lens of posthumanism foreground the vital tools poetry offers for thinking about embeddedness, interconnectedness, materiality, embodiment, accountability and vulnerability. This book opens exciting new avenues for thinking about poetry and medicine together, enriching both poetry studies and the medical humanities in the process.”
—Heather Milne, Professor, University of Winnipeg, author of Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics
Reviews
Tana Jean Welch inhabits a space where poetry, posthumanism, and medicine converge to show how poetry can provide a posthumanist perspective that activates an ethical understanding of what it means to be ‘human’ in the world… it is an important and timely book that problematizes how we relate to violent events around us. Her note on vulnerability, ‘to be honest about our material vulnerability and our knotted relations is to realize that what’s happening elsewhere, is actually happening here, to all of us’ (168), reminds us that we have a responsibility to reject complicity and to rethink our subjectivity as part of a global ill-health assemblage that constitutes bodies (human and nonhuman), genocidal practices, and a climate crisis. Shahira Hathout, The British Society for Literature and Science