Overview
- Redefines posthumanism via neoliberal and human capital theories
- Considers the interdependent relationship between genres of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature
- Explores the political, economic, and scientific narratives of the biotech century
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels
Authors: Justin Omar Johnston
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26256-3Published: 14 October 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26259-4Published: 14 October 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-26257-0Published: 01 October 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 187
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations
Topics: Fiction, Contemporary Literature, Literature and Technology/Media