%0 Journal Article
%A Gal, Michalle
%A Gil, David
%A Shen, Yeshayahu
%+ Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T Introduction : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000E-3E81-B
%R 10.1215/03335372-10824142
%7 2023-12-01
%D 2023
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X A hybrid entity is conceived of as an inseparable combination of components associated with two or more distinct entities—the hybrid's parents. A central feature of the hybrid is that whereas its parents are typically familiar entities belonging to well-established categories, the hybrid itself is, or at least starts out as, a novel and unfamiliar entity whose categorial membership is not immediately obvious and often never determined. The notion of hybrid is extremely broad; popular sites on the internet provide a great many different entries whose titles contain the term hybrid, addressing a wide array of items from domains as diverse as language (e.g., portmanteau terms and oxymorons), poetry (e.g., contemporary hybrid American poetics), botany (e.g., cross-pollinated plants such as sweet corn or hybrid grape), technology (e.g., a hybrid vehicle or computer), art (e.g., hybrid genres and figures), mythology and myth (e.g., hybrid creatures), education (e.g., hybrid classes), and visual and material studies (e.g., posthumanism, which analyzes cyborgs as well as rigid links between the human body and machines like cellular phones). What is more, the concept of hybridity has been attributed with an all-inclusive extension and a great many uses by current cultural studies. While hybrids have been around since the dawn of civilization, the phenomenon has reached a peak at the turn of the millennium, and claims that ours is “an age of hybridization” are expressed by theoreticians of postmodernism (Thomas 2005; Hazan 2015). Thus, the hybrid is a special but omnipresent cultural phenomenon that is the expression of a complex trait of human nature. It embodies the human aspiration and need for a well-ordered world combined with the incompatible wish to transgress the world's categories and disrupt them (only to attach them yet again to a self-conflicting but solid entity).
%J Poetics Today
%V 44
%N 4
%& 505
%P 505 - 511
%I Duke University Press
%@ 0333-5372