Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

ISBN-13: 9783030262594 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 187 str.

Justin Omar Johnston

Spis treści

Chapter One: Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre

From the “Biotech Century” to “Biology is Technology”

Be More Human and Human Capital Theory

Genres of Futurity

Chapter Two: Clones: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 

The Disciplinary Fence

Species of Discipline

The Open Fence

The Service Station

Affect and Climate Change in “England, late 1990s”

The Litter-ary Fence

Becoming Posthuman Again

Chapter Three: Animal-Human Hybrids: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

The Tree of Life: Species, Evolution, and Patents

ChickieNobs: Repugnance and Neoliberal Families

Corporate Domesticity: Animals in Heat

Corporate Domesticity: Reproduction, Maternity, and Escape   

Corporate Domesticity: Videos, Bodies, and the Domestic Treehouse 

Oryx and Genre

Chapter Four: Toxic Bodies: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Neo-Liberalism, Environmental Technologies, and Human Capital

In the Shadow of Human Rights

Tragic Accidents and Human Extras

The Human Element 

Ambivalence: Humanism and “Something Different”

Chapter Five: Cyborgs: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods 

The Stone Gods: Planet Orbus and Planet Blue

Unlimited Finitude and Cyborg Feminism

Unexceptional Exceptions and Easter Island

The Biopolitics of Evolutionary Time

Chapter Six: Coda: Genres of Futurity

Genre and Bewilderment

O autorze

Justin Omar Johnston is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Stony Brook University, USA, where he teaches classes on contemporary and Anglophone novels, Science and Literature, and biopolitics. He is an organizing member of the New Environmentalisms seminar and the Wicked Problems podcast series. His work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, Diesis, and Masculinities.

Blurb

This book examines several distinctive literary figurations of posthuman embodiment as they proliferate across a range of internationally acclaimed contemporary novels: clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, animal-human hybrids in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, toxic bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and cyborgs in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. While these works explore the transformational power of the “biotech century,” they also foreground the key role human capital theory has played in framing human belonging as an aspirational category that is always and structurally just out of reach, making contemporary subjects never-human-enough. In these novels, the dystopian character of human capital theory is linked to fantasies of apocalyptic release. As such, these novels help expose how two interconnected genres of futurity (the dystopian and the apocalyptic) work in tandem to propel each other forward so that fears of global disaster become alibis for dystopian control, which, in turn, becomes the predicate for intensifying catastrophes. In analyzing these novels, Justin Omar Johnston draws attention to the entanglement of bodies in technological environments, economic networks, and deteriorating ecological settings.