Revolting Delight: Posthuman Subversion in the Work of Leonora Carrington

Author

Jacob Breeding, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleFollow

Date of Award

5-2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Urmila Seshagiri

Committee Members

Mary Papke, Alisa Schoenbach

Abstract

This thesis explores the posthuman implications of Leonora Carrington’s writing, painting, and other works. Carrington’s is a remedial project, one that points to a healthier potential future beyond the conceptual limits of humanism. Her body of work disorders the projected/created order of human society (with its arrogant philosophies and systems of knowledge) and supplies a sublimely recombined “order” of its own—one that, in its very grotesquerie, defies human hubris and solipsism and celebrates everything else besides. In spite of the undermining inherent in her work, Carrington provides a positive alternative to some of the “-isms” that spring from humanism and Anthropocentric thinking. Carrington opposes any system that would create “definitive” definitions of “the human” or that would otherwise pretend to knowledge and authority beyond its limits.

Recommended Citation

Breeding, Jacob, "Revolting Delight: Posthuman Subversion in the Work of Leonora Carrington. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2022.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/6419