What is the Human? Australian Voices from the Humanities

Description

How do we define the human today? Have the tumultuous changes of the past half century created such new conditions and epistemologies that all older ideas and answers are obsolete? Are Humanities disciplines and the knowledge they contain now consigned to specialist interest in an irrelevant past?

This book brings together seventeen Australian voices giving illuminating pers-pectives on these fundamental questions. They speak from many disciplines in the Humanities and probe the cultural products of humanity, past and present, inscribed on bodies and texts, in oral, print and digital media.

Some explore the place of the human among the animals and machines with which we share so much. They reflect on problems of the corporate world and pre-modern cultures of Asia and Europe. They learn from popular cultural forms like computer simulations and Japanese manga and dolls. They look in new ways at a range of literary forms and at figurations of the human in drama, verse, novel and film. From this extraordinary array of art and ingenuity from the past and the present, they cast a stark light on the human, what it was, is, and may be.