The rapid development of the field of Posthumanism is testament to the field's importance for contemplating the crucial questions of how we might overcome the various shortcomings of humanism. Yet, ...despite its productive insights and sharp anti-humanist critique there remains the question of translating these into a praxis. I argue that a critical posthumanist praxis remains an underexplored aspect of the field and I explore productive sites of engagement from which post humanism may begin to explicate a suitable praxis. For this, I turn to Ruth Ozeki's novel, A Tale for the Time Being, a text which is deeply invested in posthumanist problematics, but also juxtaposes this with an extended meditation on Zen Buddhist philosophy. Ozeki's book thus offers a productive site upon which to stage an encounter between posthumanism and Zen Buddhism. I argue that reading the novel's Zen themes alongside posthumanist theory offers productive ways of developing a posthumanist praxis. Specifically, I explore what I term as extrospection, an analogous practice to introspection that differs through its deconstruction of subject-object binaries. Additionally, I argue that the novel reframes our ethical and political frameworks away from ontology, and towards modes of relationality through its exploration of the 'time-being.'
It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and ...utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of 'reality-effect'.
The article addresses issues concerning objective, or systemic, violence which legitimizes and conditions other forms of violence – psychological, economic, sexual, physical, etc. These issues are ...approached from the perspective of frustrations and traumas experienced by individuals as a consequence of the shift of the sociohistorical paradigm, which has so far been principally governed by the mechanisms and interests of global postindustrial capitalism. Through the analysis of the status of reality and subject in A Tale for the Time Being, a 2013 novel by Japanese-American author Ruth Ozeki, I first identify the violent and traumatic aspects of contemporary conditions as experienced by the protagonists in the novel. Then, Ozeki’s literary scenario for improving quotidian existence of individuals via internalization of Dogen’s Zen Buddhist principles is assessed from the perspective of the philosophical definitions of the categories of subject and reality in postmodernity, as well as in relation to the actual conditions in the global consumerist societies of the digital age. The article maintains that Ozeki’s solution of the protagonists’ existential crises is rather significant since the fundamental premises of Zen Buddhism correspond to the metaphysical structuring of postmodernity. The novel hence illuminates the productive facets of the fractal nature of postmodern individuals, as well as the role literature can play in their concretisation.
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