Chapter 2 - Mary Shelley’s Modern and Shelley Jackson’s Postmodern Prometheus

Summary

So writes Ihab Hassan, who is widely agreed to have coined the term “posthumanism.” The occasion of his remarks was a symposium on postmodern performance, in a 1977 talk titled “Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture.” And, like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her presentation of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Hassan is highly conflicted about the promethean promise of the posthuman, which he presents as a “dubious neologism.” At the same time, he recognizes that “five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end,” and with it we can no longer accept without question the narrative of man as an autonomous rational agent – one that relies on universal and anthropocentric orientations cofounded on human reason.