Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics

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Description

Wild Childconsiders how twenty-first-century fiction imagines the decision to reproduce and the ethical challenges of posthumanist parenting. Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and caregivers in extreme situationsfrom the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death and global apocalypsein such works as Toni Morrison'sA Mercy, Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road, and Denis Villeneuve's filmPrisoners.

Reviews

"Your child isnt civilized. Neither are you. Expect the child to be more productively destructive and survivalist than you imagined, showing us to be the techno-relational-vulnerable animals that we are, strange to the core in crisis and change. Also expect that you wont find a smarter, more forthright, and beautifully nuanced guide to these thoughts than Naomi Morgenstern. Impressive and persuasive."Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

"Wild Child is a brilliant and thoroughly engaging study of reproductive ethics and the ethics of parenting in narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Naomi Morgenstern's command of theoretical texts, both philosophical and psychoanalytic, is prodigious, and her writing style is vibrantat once theoretically complex and alive with personal twists and turns of language."Jean Wyatt, author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels

Author Bio

Naomi Morgenstern is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.