Khelfi, LamisseAaid, Salah Eddine2024-05-192024-05-192023http://dspace.univ-oeb.dz:4000/handle/123456789/19393The aim of this dissertation is to challenge the construction of the humanist subject by casting doubt on anthropocentrically-oriented notions of agency and supremacy. Agency is traditionally situated within the exclusive privileged province of the rational human subject. This limited conceptualization is inherently hierarchical as it rests upon the premise that Man, by virtue of his exceptional ability to act with rationality and intentionality, is separated from and elevated above an inert Nature that is ready to be acted upon and exploited for human use. Acclaimed supernatural British writer Algernon Blackwood, informed by his own lifetime reverence to the Great outdoors, paints a deeply transformative experience in which the protagonists meet the gaze of a Nature that is antithetical to the defaulted idea of a passive backdrop. Thrown off the self-claimed throne the characters are forced to rethink the terms of their own existence. Thinking or rethinking human-ness outside the anthropocentric box is at the core of (Critical) Posthumanism which serves as the theoretical framework inside which this dissertation lies. Critical Posthumanism signals the end of the humanist legacy that promotes human interests at the expense of the marginalized nonhuman other. To serve the Posthumanist project, Weird fiction is adopted as an adequate tool as it provides a reality that is completely indifferent to notions of human exceptionalism and self-aggrandizement. Immense scale and the concept of the abcanny (endemically-Weird monstrosities) are used to showcase just how limited human agency is as the protagonist in Blackwood's works fail to apprehend and accordingly act against the entities and scales they face. Both of these notions are discussed as thematically relevant to the Anthropocene, which entails ecological crisis that are on the one hand very much the product of human activity and expansion and on the other hand involves intense unpredictable events that exceed and escape human control.enScale anthropocene; Post humanism; AgencyOther