ABSTRACT

Posthumanist theory has stressed the fictionality of accounts of human exceptionality and has viewed humans as particular sorts of things in a non-hierarchical relation with the universe of things. This approach has recently been taken up by nineteenth-century American literary scholarship through works by Michael Jonik, Cristin Ellis, Matthew Taylor, and others. However, because posthumanism can emphasise interconnection between human and nonhuman, it can run into difficulty, particularly in accounting for ethical imperatives. Drawing from Mark McGurl’s theorisation of the giant as symbolic of the reality of physical forces, this essay considers how the size of the whale in Moby-Dick is a central descriptive problem of crossing scalar boundaries within a material field. What such a speculative reading offers is an understanding of Moby-Dick’s size as both a challenge and an affordance for the expansion of the human. Through prosthesis, the human may scale up to the whale’s size, but that also entails a change of scalar field that disorients what such scaling procedures are for. Allowing for the difference between scales not only challenges narratives of human dominance in particular ways, but it also reveals, in Moby-Dick, an indication of a route towards a plural and posthuman ethics of discrete scales.

摘要

后人类主义理论强调了对人类特殊性的描述的虚构性，并将人类视为与事物宇宙处于非等级关系的特殊事物。最近，19 世纪美国文学奖学金通过迈克尔·乔尼克、克里斯汀·埃利斯、马修·泰勒等人的作品采用了这种方法。然而，因为后人类主义可以强调人类与非人类之间的相互联系，所以它可能会遇到困难，特别是在解释道德要求方面。本文借鉴 Mark McGurl 关于巨人作为物理力现实象征的理论，考虑了《白鲸记》中鲸鱼的大小如何成为跨越内部标量边界的中心描述问题。一个物质领域。这种推测性阅读所提供的是将《白鲸记》的体型理解为人类扩张的挑战和启示。通过假肢，人类可以放大到鲸鱼的大小，但这也需要改变标量场，使这种缩放程序的用途变得迷惑。允许尺度之间的差异不仅以特定方式挑战人类主导地位的叙述，而且在白鲸记中揭示了通往离散尺度的多元和后人类伦理的途径。