Posthuman Pathogenesis

Başak AĞIN, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English Literature and faculty member at TED University, Ankara, Turkey. She is the founder of "PENTACLE: Posthuman Entanglements of Culture, Literature, and Environment," the first Turkish website dedicated to posthumanities (https://thepentacle.org). Her monograph, Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu (["Posthumanism: Concept, Theory, Science-Fiction"] 2020, Siyasal), is the first Turkish work to explore science fiction literary/filmic narratives in light of posthumanist-new materialist theories. Dr. Ağın edited M. Sibel Dinçel’s Turkish translation of Simon C. Estok’s The Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018, Routledge), which came out in 2021 as Ekofobi Hipotezi (Cappadocia UP), and is currently editing a Turkish handbook of environmental, medical, digital, and posthumanities. She is also co-editing an international volume, Ecofeminism and World Literature: African, Middle Eastern, and Asian Perspectives, with Douglas Vakoch. Her articles appeared in scholarly journals like Neohelicon, CLCWeb, Translation Review, and Ecozon@. Şafak HORZUM, Ph.D., is an independent scholar based in Ankara, Turkey. A former Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, Department of English, he focuses on the human-nonhuman relations in fantasy fiction, specifically in the works of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll in his doctoral dissertation. Horzum was awarded in 2016 the ASLE grant for his Turkish-English translation of Oya Baydar’s postapocalyptic novel The General of the Garbage Dump, which awaits its publisher. Having received the travel grant from the Ehrenpreis Center for Swift Studies, he will join Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 2022. Horzum’s publications in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals concentrate on translation studies, the theories of men and masculinities as well as queer sexualities in British drama and fiction from the seventeenth century onwards. Horzum is also one of the editors of "PENTACLE: Posthuman Entanglements of Culture, Literature, and Environment," the first Turkish website dedicated to posthumanities (https://thepentacle.org).

Foreword: Posthumanism in the Year of COVID-19

Pramod K. Nayar

An Implosive Introduction: Haunted Experiences, Affective Assemblages, and Collective Imaginings

Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

Part I: Discontents of the Human and Its Others






Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times: On Camus’ Tragic Humanism
Stefan Herbrechter




Viruses as Posthuman Biocultural Creatures: Parasites, Biopolitics, and Contemporary Literary Reflections
Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu

Part II: Pathogenic Temporalities




Viral Temporalities: Literatures of Disease and Posthuman Conceptions of Time
Ruth Clemens and Max Casey




Pathogenic Hugs and Ambiguous Times: The Joy Epidemic in Gumball
André Vasques Vital

Part III: Pestilentia Loquens: Narrative Agency of Disease




Symbiotic Adaptation in Posthuman Feminist Environs: Viral Becomings in Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite
Şafak Horzum




Power or Despair: Contagious Diseases in Turkish History and Miniature Paintings
Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan

Part IV: Contagious Networks of Communication




Hyperobjects, Network Ontologies, and the Pandemic Response in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio
Jayde Martin and Ben Horn




Entangled Humans, Entangled Languages: A Posthumanist Applied Linguistic Analysis of COVID-19 on Reddit
Tan Arda Gedik and Zeynep Arpaözü

Part V: From Medical Humanities to Medical Posthumanities




HIV, Dependency, and Prophylactic Narrative in Bryan Washington’s "Waugh"
Stian Kristensen




The Vampire as Posthumanist Pharmakon: Towards a Critical Medical Humanities

Ronja Tripp-Bodola

CODA: Affirming the Pathogenesis

Başak Ağın

Afterword: Posthuman Healing and Revealing

Francesca Ferrando