| Sumario: | Human critical and creative practices are increasingly enmeshed in nonhuman technologies, raising challenges for our disciplines in the context of machine-centred futures that encompass what I term here spectraltech, technological and digital capacities that feature seemingly superhuman and supernatural capabilities that haunt, double and mirror actual human capacities. As the humanities disciplines shift increasingly into a posthumanities space, literary studies is both threatened and yet well-equipped. As the authors of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (2017) illustrate, literature from every era, dating back to antiquity, has imagined human intersections with the non-human, with supernatural power, and with the creative possibilities, limits and risks in these spaces of encounter. At the same time, theorists such as Martha Nussbaum have highlighted the centrality of the humanities in fostering critical thinking, capacities for debate and critique, developing empathy, political citizenship and maintaining democracies – skills vital for speaking back to machines and systems. This article argues that in early modern literature, several of the key texts – created in a context where the supernatural was inherently part of imagining the human condition – anticipate and provide ways for thinking through the challenges of spectraltech in the twenty-first century.
|
|---|