Han Kang. The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith. London/New York: Hogarth, 2015. 252pp.

Abstract

Posthumanism reformulates the idea of human agency and its relationship with the natural world. By shunning dualisms, it blurs the man-made boundaries between the human and the animal in the natural and technological world. As a rejection of universality, posthumanist studies aim to rearrange the way we view societal values through a more intersectional approach, without completely divorcing itself from the tradition of humanism. Instead, it seeks to expand the way the human interacts with the wider world, and in the case of The Vegetarian, the title character Yeong-hye’s actions may be part of a moral imperative