Accommodating the Posthuman in Twentieth Century Dystopian Literature.pdf

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Accommodating the Posthuman in Twentieth Century
Dystopian Literature
A Dissertation Presented
by
Karl Luther Shaddox
to
The Graduate School
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
English
Stony Brook University
December 2008
Stony Brook University
The Graduate School
Karl Luther Shaddox
We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the
Doctor of Philosophy degree,
hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation.
Ira Livingston, Dissertation Co-director, Professor, English
and Humanities, Pratt Institute
Ben Robinson, Chairperson of Defense, Associate Professor,
English
Stacey Olster, Dissertation Co-director, Professor, English
Don Ihde, Outside Reader, Professor, Philosophy
This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School
Lawrence Martin
Dean of the Graduate School
ii
Abstract of the Dissertation
Accommodating the Posthuman in Twentieth Century Dystopian Literature
by
Karl Luther Shaddox
Doctor of Philosophy
in
English
Stony Brook University
2008
This dissertation brings together Anglo-American literature, literary theory and the
discourses of science and feminist studies of science to articulate a more socially
responsible account of science, technology and humans. Central to this project is
something that has been called the posthuman, a term which comes freighted with its own
baggage, admittedly, but which, nevertheless, is a useful, even necessary trope to
illustrate an aesthetics reflective of the technologically mediated world in which the
human is immersed.
I have opened and closed this study with Marge Piercy's
He, She and It
because
the novel's parallel narratives circumscribe chronologically the de-humanizing of humans
and the emergence of the posthuman. The sub-narrative, a fictional rendering of Rabbi
iii
Loew of 16th century Prague who creates, from the mud banks of the Vltava, a golem,
rehearses the stock admonishments against human creation. The main narrative, set in a
futurist, highly technologically mediated society, recounts the tentative evolution of a
non-human centered worldview.
While the selections by Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams
and
The
Degradation of the Democratic Dogma,
and Philip K. Dick,
Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?,
are, to varying degrees, anxious over the loss of human sovereignty,
Kazuo Ishiguro's
Never Let Me Go
and Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow
affirm, in
distinctive ways, what feminist science studies writer Donna Haraway refers to as "cyborg
politics," a rewriting of humanism's anthropocentric view of the world, the recognition
that one is not human, the autonomous being endowed with innate capacities of reason,
freewill and self-determination. Rather, he or she is a creature constructed of
heterogeneous influences, material conditions and historical consequences. The shift in
perspective, as dramatized in these novels, from a sovereign self versus the world to an
agential figure more intimately attuned to its own continuity with the world, offers a
re-imagining of the future, a hoped for alternative to the speciesist hierarchism of liberal
humanism.
iv

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