Posthuman Studies Lab
Sutirtho Roy
Sutirtho Roy, pursuing a Master of Arts degree in English Language and Literature
at The University of Calcutta, has earned his BA with a First Class from the same
institution, while ranking first in his college. He has co-authored an anthology of
poetry, and written a novel which has garnered positive reviews from Inkitt and
Webnovel. Furthermore, he had won gold and silver medals at Olympiads,
secured the third rank in a state-wide essay contest regarding the ills of drug
abuse and bagged a prize at a quiz contest organized by Oxford. He has served as
panellist at international workshops pertaining to post-humanism, and his papers
have been selected for presentation at Brit Grad 2021 and NEPCA 2021 and
publication in various international journals. When not invested in canonical
studies, he likes to analyse popular culture, and hopes to undertake future
research in critical animal studies and post-humanism. He currently freelances at
several content writing firms, and also has an internationally well-renowned toy
photography page on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dinotoy.com
The Creator in the Creation: Fractured Selves in a Liminal Space, Seen
Through a Meta-textual Lens of World-building
The creator has shared an interesting relationship with the creation since time
immemorial – the architect with the building, the author with the story, the child
with the lump of clay that may have been shaped by his or her hands into an
entity that only makes sense to that child but not to the more rigid world of
adults. In building worlds – through stories, through revolutionary forms of
architecture, through films, through Lego-scapes and even simply through the
imagination, the creator has enjoyed a transcendental position of power over the
creation, through a demonstrative ability to manipulate the creation as per their
whims. The purpose of this study is to look at the very nature of world building
itself, and attempt to embrace a post-human, post-dualistic relationship of the
world with its builder which rethinks the power differentials.
This research, therefore aims to look at critical and artistic works which testify to
the same – including my own web comics (created through toy photography) and
novels. My own work embraces an inter-connective relationality between
disparate media and virtual spaces – photographs, written text, images, videos,
memes and traced drawings – while the protagonists in my novel are post-human
in the very way they attempt to see beyond the ‘Self’/’Other’ binary to attempt
an existence in a Harroway-esque multi-species assemblage which consciously
holds up a lens to critical animal studies in a post-humanist world. Therefore, my
characters embrace post-humanism, which is a subtle adoption of the authorial
intent, linking the creation and the creator in a manner that locates the creator in
the creation, rather than above and beyond it. A popular debate is that one
cannot separate the text from the author, and such seems to question the very
dualistic nature of the creator/ creation boundary.
I also hope, through my work and others, to highlight the conscious placement of
author’s selves in their works, through cameo appearances and crossovers. This
created self is the author himself or herself, and exists in a fragmentary liminal
space as both, the creator and the created, a manipulated self that is self-
sustained within the work. We are parts of the world we build, whether
consciously or not – such may also be linked in authorial desires to immortalize
the self or loved ones (as in Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Tennyson’s In Memoriam).
Furthermore, this study seeks to use this entire scenario as an analogy to
negotiate with the place we occupy in terms of any possible higher powers that
may or may not exist. Finally, it looks at the linguistic and cognitive aspects which
come into play while delving into the dialectics of such reality