Research Information System
Fantasy literature breaches the great divide between dualities, making marginalized and disempowered nonhuman beings much more audible, visible, and intelligible. In fantasy, the human gets stripped of its so-called superiority and is guided to attain a more-than-human subjectivity at the end of the fantastic journey. In parallel with the character of fantasy fiction, critical posthumanism interrogates the notion of the human as the zenith of the universe, the reliance on and parameters of rationality, and the agential capabilities of subjects other than the human. Criticizing the liberal humanist notion of anthropocentric subjectivity as continuously structured in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article combines the discourses of the early example of fantasy fiction, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and contemporary posthumanist theories. In this context, it positions Swift as a proto-posthumanist satirist and scrutinizes the Lilliputian praxes of hybridizing and nonhumanizing Gulliver in Travels. In this scrutiny, I claim that Gulliver experiences a systematic process of nonhumanization and his sense of humanness is undermined to the extent of transforming into a posthumanist subjectivity.
