Svetlana Alexievich and Posthuman Narratives
Svetlana Alexievich and Posthuman Narratives

Summary/Abstract: This article sets out to explore tensions and symptoms arising in humanist thought, how they influenced fiction and what is understood as fiction in a decisive manner. In the posthuman paradigm story-telling reveals the inner fractures of humanism and its representations. In recent years, celebrated and awarded writers have introduced hybrid forms of the novel, like in the case of Herta Müller and Svetlana Alexievich. Next to how language is embroiled in depicting a fragmented world of details, objects, symbols and trauma in Herta Müller’s works, we find Svetlana Alexievich’s collected testimonies. Alexievich’s novels explore the physical experience of war (Zinky Boys, The Unwomanly Face of War) and the disappearance of one’s world (Secondhand Times). If Herta Müller’s stories already capture a fragmented reality in total discordance with our sense of selves and the world, Alexievich gives voice to individual narrators evoking provisional representations of the self. Herta Müller’s and Svetlana Alexievich’s books make room for the plural and nomadic subject to explore and recreate an already incoherent life, reality and even death. The narrative voices transgress time and space, in order to showcase how the current (post)human subject, released from any type of framing, looks for proper means of expression.

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