The (post)humanist image of human in Ieva Toleikytė’s prose and poetry

Abstract

This paper analyzes the human image in Ieva Toleikytė’s collection of short stories “Garstyčių namas” (2009) and the poetry collection “Raudonas slidus rūmas” (2020) through the lens of posthumanism. The article introduces the philosophy of posthumanism and posthumanist reading as the foundation for analyzing these literary works. The research problem examined in this article is how the representation of a human evolves in Toleikytė’s work and whether it corresponds to the envisioned posthumanist conception of the human. The analysis shows that the portrayal of a human deviates from the ideal of humanism in Toleikytė’s poetry, suggesting a significantly altered perception of humanity. It was observed that the character images in the short stories do not considerably diverge from the humanist individual: in the book “Garstyčių namas,” an ambitious, individualistic, self-sufficient human is exalted. In one way or another, all texts return to the image of man as distinct from other forms of life.