Posthuman Captial and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

The article provides an overview of how literary and scientific imagination have been entangled and how views of the imagination’s intermediation between the material (body) and the immaterial (mind) have changed over the course of the centuries. The paper then traces the productive interchange between science and literature and the emergence of an increasingly (bio)technology-centred utopian/dystopian discourse that explores as key motif the link between the imagined intersection or interface of the human self (identity) and the machine/(bio)technological other/alterity, celebrating the future advent of post-humans and cautioning against such an impending doom. A survey of selected eco- and biotechnological dystopias or sf--ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) to Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover (1981), Marge Piercy's The Body of Glass (1991) and Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2002)--is followed by an in-depth model analysis of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013).

Global Social Sciences Review

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Never) exposes the oppressive role of ideology in imploding human identity through societal training, education, and the social roles of clones in the human world. Cloning is another marvel of biotechnology which has given birth to many optimistic as well as pessimistic narratives. The post human narrative is central to dystopia as it tends to put forward the regressive use of biotechnology that has the potential to disrupt the essential human identity and implement a sort of reduction-ism which manifest gratification and conformity. The desire to indoctrinate conformity indicates the late capitalistic tactics of commodification which results in an identity implosion. The paper asserts that ideological maneuvering and construction of imploded identities are exhibited through dystopian bio-technologies in the agency of post humanism, which represent com-modified identity politics. The post human, in this context, serves as the Other of stratified human ide...

Palgrave studies in literature, science and medicine, 2019

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.

Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science. A 2 Volume Set. DQR Studies in Literature 47. Ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani and C.C. Barfoot. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011. 379-94. , 2011

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, 2020

The late twentieth-century literature and popular culture have been concerned about various dimensions of the Human and the idea of the person. A sample of such texts would include cult texts and critically renowned works around these themes. In the dystopian film Repo Men (2010), starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, humans with diseased organs can buy replacement organs at exorbitant EMIs from firms. These organs are repossessed, like cars or houses, if the buyer reneges or even falls back on the payments. As Remy (Jude Law), one of the "repo men" (those who assigned with the task of "repossessing") says at one point when he discovers that he himself has a heart implant, "this new heart is accumulating interest with every beat." In Kazuo Ishiguro's critically acclaimed Never Let Me Go (2005), clones are manufactured and reared to adulthood, when they begin donating their organs to enable humanity to survive. In the Swedish author Ninni Holmquist's The Unit ([2006] 2017), women who are fifty and men sixty-nine years of age respectively, and childless, are deemed "dispensable," serving as living cadavers to donate organs. The parents in Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper (2004) have created Anna as a bone-marrow match for her leukemia-afflicted elder sister, Kate. Margaret Atwood conceives a future society where fertile women are treated as reproductive units in The Handmaid's Tale (1986). We could subsume these under the broad category of "popular posthumanism," dealing with and interested in the borders of the human and the machine, the arrival of lifeforms through non-standard reproductive mechanisms, and the ethics around blurred bodies, organs and "persons." Posthumanist thought has drawn upon a diverse range of philosophies and thinkers as well as having a sustained interest in the role of capitalism and biopower. Critical posthumanism, which focuses on the materiality of the body, is also alert to biological citizenship in which the material body is produced in and imbricated with technoscience and capitalist processes of exploitation of biopower. By rejecting the view of the autonomous subject and instead proposing a subject that is essentially intersubjective and intercorporeal, posthumanism refashions the very idea of the human. This critical posthumanism may be fruitfully utilized to study the enormously influential and often insidious expansion of biocapitalism. The first theme in these texts of biocapitalism is the precarious nature of species identity and borders, which are often mediated by corporations and research organizations (exemplified in Atwood's HelthWyser and AnooYoo in the MaddAddam Trilogy).

2017

Genetic technologies are now sufficiently advanced to alter the human genome. Indeed, gene editing is already practiced in some countries for medical purposes. However, future directions for the use of genetic technologies are unclear. Scholars of the “posthuman” future tend to speculate that genetic engineering (and other technologies) will create superhumans, and the term “human enhancement” is used to describe the practice of “improving” the human form. However, recent fiction on bioengineering themes envisages not a programme of enhancement, but rather the creation of a new genetic class system in which cloned or engineered human-like organisms form an oppressed and abused minority. These organisms – which I term genetic posthumans – have emerged as protagonists in numerous novels and films, allowing for a humanising view of the interiority of the cloned or engineered mind. This humanised mind is then juxtaposed to the genetic posthuman’s othered status. In order to establish the alterity of the genetic posthuman, storytellers strategically recycle modes of dehumanisation applied in historical race- or gender-based struggles. In each case, genetic posthumans are described in a manner recalling other oppressed outgroups: they are made secondary to unaltered humans, they are economically exploited, and they are treated as animals despite their evident humanness. This primes audiences to accept the purported differences of the genetic posthuman as social constructions rather than “natural” or biologically innate distinctions. This thesis proposes that contemporary genetic engineering fictions act as a corrective to the assumptions of posthumanist theory by positioning genetic posthuman characters as disadvantaged beings, using forms of dehumanisation made familiar by recent history. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) are examined as key examples of fiction in this area. Other novels, plays, and films are also analysed, including George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971); Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976); Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May (1989); Michael Marshall Smith’s Spares (1996); Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002); and Michael Bay’s The Island (2005). Each of these works contests the posthumanist assumption that genetic technologies will be used to improve the human form. Although human enhancement is a possible outcome of genetic engineering, these storytellers imply another scenario: that corporatized science could lead to the creation of economically useful, animalised, dehumanised creatures. These genetic posthumans could have human (or human-like) bodies and minds, but not human rights.

American Studies, 2014

food, forgiveness, peacemaking, reading the Bible, envy, gratitude, and failure. Like a meandering stream, the book flows from one topic to the next in a unified whole and accomplishes its stated purpose of stimulating "readers to inspire and cultivate good passions, and to help them discover ways to turn their transitory desires into lifelong loves." Devotional in nature, the content does not bypass personal application but presents key reflection questions that challenge readers to locate themselves within the various themes. As master storyteller, Wells closes by sharing the personal words of his bishop following a season of deep discouragement in ministry: "You're going to need time-but you need to learn to dream again." This is a timely (and necessary) read!

2009

English Dissertations, 2010

As a replacement for, or supplement to, the human, the posthuman produces figures that highlight the socially constructed nature of human identity. This dissertation undertakes to demonstrate how several British novelists have used the concept as a supplement or replacement for ...

Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue that posthumanism is not just an epistemology (Wolfe, 2009), but an aesthetic that blends three elements – the primitive, technology and horror. The interrelation of these three elements produces an aesthetic sensibility, that says three things about non-humanist conceptions of life. First, we draw attention to metamorphosis as an engine that encourages the viewer to recognise life not as being, but as perpetual becoming. However, as an antidote to the liberatory promises of ‘flow’, we specifically argue for a distinction between morphing and mutating, showing how each articulates opposing fantasies of posthumanism. Second, the concept of primal technology is introduced, which injects the humanist understanding of technology with an alternative, subterranean and posthuman supplement. Third, proto-atavism introduces the concept that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life. Ancient and future evolutionary traits exist in the present – both in the aesthetic imagination and in everyday life. Ultimately, we work towards a more wide-ranging idea – a posthuman biology – an ethical imperative which reminds us that, in a technological age, life is no longer containable in ‘simple’ life.