Abstract This article examines how contemporary global fiction interrogates the limits of the human through literary form, employing posthuman refusal as its analytical framework. Drawing on Francesca Ferrando's discussions of posthuman refusal as a mode of resisting anthropocentric closure, the study situates refusal as a reading practice attentive to the ways literature suspends human centrality. The argument is further informed by formalist insights (Jameson, Levine), biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe), and the instability of meaning (Derrida) to demonstrate how narrative form itself functions as ontological critique, destabilizing anthropocentric assumptions embedded in coherence, perspective, and temporality. Close analysis of Han Kang's The Vegetarian , Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation , and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead reveals how each novel stages a distinct challenge to human sovereignty—vegetal ontology, ecological opacity, and species hierarchy—while converging in formal strategies of estrangement such as fractured narration, focal instability, and epistemic collapse. Through comparative close reading and attention to textual structures, the article demonstrates how fiction enacts posthuman refusal not only thematically but formally, contributing to world‐literary inquiry and engaging ongoing debates on climate, multispecies justice, and decolonial ecologies.
Francis Xavier R. Salcedo (Mon,) studied this question.