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 globaldisaster 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.

Autorentext

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.

Zusammenfassung

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.

Inhalt
Chapter One: Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and GenreFrom the Biotech Century to Biology is TechnologyBe More Human and Human Capital TheoryGenres of FuturityChapter Two: Clones: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go The Disciplinary FenceSpecies of DisciplineThe Open FenceThe Service StationAffect and Climate Change in England, late 1990sThe Litter-ary FenceBecoming Posthuman AgainChapter Three: Animal-Human Hybrids: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and CrakeThe Tree of Life: Species, Evolution, and PatentsChickieNobs: Repugnance and Neoliberal FamiliesCorporate Domesticity: Animals in HeatCorporate Domesticity: Reproduction, Maternity, and Escape Corporate Domesticity: Videos, Bodies, and the Domestic Treehouse Oryx and GenreChapter Four: Toxic Bodies: Indra Sinha's Animal's PeopleNeo-Liberalism, Environmental Technologies, and Human CapitalIn the Shadow of Human RightsTragic Accidents and Human ExtrasThe Human Element Ambivalence: Humanism and Something DifferentChapter Five: Cyborgs: Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods The Stone Gods: Planet Orbus and Planet BlueUnlimited Finitude and Cyborg FeminismUnexceptional Exceptions and Easter IslandThe Biopolitics of Evolutionary TimeChapter Six: Coda: Genres of FuturityGenre and Bewilderment