To lose myself in the soul of the other that I am not: The process of becoming in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories
To lose myself in the soul of the other that I am not: The process of becoming in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories

Summary/Abstract: The history of the critical reception of the short fiction of the writer Katherine Mansfield can be dividedinto two main areas: studies that investigate her short stories in their multiple relationships with Modernism,and more recent analyses that focus on her (post)colonial roots as a New Zealander. The cultural, gendered andphysical otherness in her short stories is the privileged subject of criticism. Conversely, what is almost completelyforgotten by the critics is her concern for the nonhuman world. What is most striking is how the otherness thatontologically characterises her life and her stories is not only a line of separation but also traces a link betweendifferent worlds. The elements of the binary paradigms are always in relation to each other and they exist onlythrough this relation. Seen from this perspective, her short stories show the links and pave the way not to separa-tion but to unity. This essay aims to highlight the relevance that the act of writing has for Mansfield in her attemptto create a new subjectivity that embeds human and nonhuman in a process of autopoiesis. Instead of seeingthe world and its inhabitants in terms of static structures, she focuses on the network of relationships betweenthem. It is in her network of relationships that she depicts what can be seen as her posthumanism ante litteram.

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