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Matthew A. Taylor, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 264 pp. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
Despite the productive conjoining of posthumanist theoretical paradigms and literary studies in the last twenty years, posthumanism has rarely been wielded as a useful and urgent tool for analyzing canonical American literature. Universes without Us begins to fill in what has remained up to now a significant and puzzling gap. The reasons for this likely have to do with what William Spanos, whose The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (1995) still stands as an exception to this rule, criticizes as the belief held by some "traditional American literary critics" who have "insisted that 'theory' is a European import inappropriate to the historically specific conditions of American cultural production" (p. 2). Although the kind of "traditional" critics that Spanos criticized are surely declining in number and relevance, the legacy of historicist-based analysis perhaps has something to do with explaining why this gap, this synaptic failure, exists.
This has not been the case for the canon of American science fiction, texts long favored (Katherine Hayles's examination of Phillip K. Dick's work being a seminal example in How We Became Posthuman [1999]) by posthumanist literary critics for the provocative examples they offer of posthumanism as a form of advancing beyond the kind of embodied subjectivity that posits the human body as a closed system that is cut off from, and seeks to dominate, a world of objects. But what of those texts that do not offer explicit examples of bodies in flux-cybernetic, artificial, prosthetic? And what of those texts that do not fit into the typical genres favored by posthumanists-dystopian, utopian, gothic, and science fictional? How might posthumanism inform more conventional texts, but also, how might these texts expand and invigorate posthumanism? How might posthumanism slide through the historicist safeguards that tend to buffer the canon of US literature from the theoretical examinations typical of posthumanist inquiry?
Taylor's book answers these questions by asserting the existence of "posthuman cosmologies," an alternative "posthumanist tradition"...