Ruth Gilbert

At the borders of the human : beasts, bodies and natural philosophy in the early modern period

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy apparently established boundaries between the human and its others, but paradoxically, also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying and pornography). Essays focus on literary, cultural and scientific texts from the mid-sixteenth century to the late-eighteenth century.

Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Sex and Other Stories On Gods and Monsters: Defining the Early Modern Hermaphrodite Telling the Truth of Sex: The Hermaphrodite in Biology and Law Both and Neither: Rewriting Ovids Hermaphrodite Mingle-Mangle: Masculine Women and Feminine Men Every Heteroclite Part: The Monstrous Hermaphrodite and the English Revolution Seeing and Knowing: Science, Pornography and the Hermaphrodite Epilogue: Re/covering the Early Modern Hermaphrodite Endnotes Bibliography Index

Ever After: Postmemory, Fairy Tales and the Body in Second-Generation Memoirs by Jewish Women

This article focuses on four recent texts that raise questions about the relationship between memory and, in Marianne Hirsch’s term, ‘postmemory’, for the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the so called ‘second generation’. Readings of Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996), Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead (1999), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1998) and Hoffman’s recent meditation on Holocaust memory, After Such Knowledge (2005) form the basis of this discussion. Each text addresses how the past shapes a sense of self but they also all problematise the idea that memory constitutes a secure way of understanding one’s own story. They thereby create narratives of the self that recognise the often provisional, unstable nature of both memory and subjectivity. This article reflects on these themes by exploring two, interwoven, strands that recur throughout these texts: the use of fairy tales as a structuring motif and the way in which postmemory is experienced as a story that is written on the body.

Jewish Ghosts: Haunting and Hospitality in Shalom Auslander's Hope

ABSTRACT This article explores the Jewish ghost motif in Shalom Auslander’s novel, Hope (2012). In particular, it focuses on the Holocaust and its ongoing reverberations within Jewish consciousness The ghost that incites the narrative is Anne Frank, reimagined by Auslander as an aged revenant who is discovered in the attic of an upstate New York home. Drawing from the work of Stephen Frosh, Susan Shapiro, and Avery Gordon, my analysis looks at matters of refracted cultural memory, vicarious victimhood, intergenerational haunting, intertextuality, and the uncanny Jewish body.

Introduction: the Dislocation of the Human

What is, what was, the ‘human’? This was the question we began with. At stake in such a question is what the history of the human can mean at a moment when, arguably, the active status of the category ‘human’ has lapsed under analysis from philosophy and the history of science, and been challenged by practices such as modifications of the body using prosthetics, robotics and artificial intelligence. The project of this book is to examine the categories and dynamics constituting the fragile category of the ‘human’ in the Renaissance to Enlightenment period, and to do so bearing in mind some of the critical reconsiderations of the term ‘human’ and its analogues — humanism, humanity, humane — made in the mid- to late twentieth century.