Abstract
Animacy hierarchies conventionally descend from subjectivity and integrated animacy down towards insensate or dead matter. John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner upends these hierarchies, positing aestheticized inanimacy as an ideal of the moral imagination. Published as posthumanist thought begins to take shape, Stoner prefigures a distancing from the humanist view of life as an integrated and enduring tradition, described by Sloterdijk as an ‘exchange of letters’, I further argue that Stoner’s unconventional posthumanist effects are dependent upon quite conventional sexist and ableist conceptions of embodiment. The novel thus demonstrates the persistence of ideologically determined valuation criteria, and the plasticity of these criteria in new, posthumanist contexts.
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Notes
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Grue, J. (2021). “A Kind of Purity”: Inanimacy, Disability, and Posthumanist Prefigurations in John Williams’ Stoner. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_10
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