Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems

by Bruce Clarke

Overview

From Dr. Moreau's Beast People to David Cronenberg's Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem's robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler's human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs.New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, Posthuman Metamorphosis develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman.Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox.Posthuman Metamorphosis draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823228508
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2008
Edition description:	2
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

BRUCE CLARKE is Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at TexasTech University and president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, 2006-2008. His publications include Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis; Dora Marsdenand Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Energy Forms: Allegory and Sciencein the Era of Classical Thermodynamics; and, co-edited with Linda Dalrymple Henderson,From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature.

Table of Contents

Figures and Tables     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: Posthuman Metamorphosis     1
Narrative and Systems     13
Nonmodern Metamorphosis     43
System and Form     61
Metamorphosis and Embedding     94
Communicating The Fly     127
Posthuman Viability     158
Conclusion: The Neocybernetic Posthuman     193
Notes     197
Bibliography     221
Index     235

Editorial Reviews

Fasten your seat belts. Bruce Clarke’s Posthuman Metamophosis takes us from 0 to 60—or in this case, from Ovid to Octavia Butler—at warp speed, ranging across a stunning array of texts, theories, and imagined universes to unpack the intellectual background, theoretical contours, land ethical and political stakes of the posthuman. Neither glibly celebratory nor polemically moralizing, Clarke’s rendering of the posthuman is itself a model of interdisciplinary posthumanist scholarship, deftly comparing interpretive frames from media theory, systems theory, biology, narratology, and much else besides, to provide us with an experiment in reading that is, itself, metamorphic.

Rice University - Cary Wolfe

The first book-length study devoted to an important and fruitful convergence of social-informational theory and narratology.”

University of Chicago - Mark Hansen

Clarke's wide-ranging and vibrant writing indicates how transformative and productive neocybernetic models can be for literary theory, offering a striking new way of studying the formal and social functions of narrative at the level of literary texts and the level of cultural practices.-Colin Milburn

Draws on the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and other theorists in a study of narratives of bodily metamorphosis.

Fasten your seat belts. Bruce Clarke's Posthuman Metamophosis takes us from 0 to 60-or in this case, from Ovid to Octavia Butler-at warp speed, ranging across a stunning array of texts, theories, and imagined universes to unpack the intellectual background, theoretical contours, land ethical and political stakes of the posthuman. Neither glibly celebratory nor polemically moralizing, Clarke's rendering of the posthuman is itself a model of interdisciplinary posthumanist scholarship, deftly comparing interpretive frames from media theory, systems theory, biology, narratology, and much else besides, to provide us with an experiment in reading that is, itself, metamorphic.-Cary Wolfe

From the Publisher

Draws on the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and other theorists in a study of narratives of bodily metamorphosis.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Clarke's wide-ranging and vibrant writing indicates how transformative and productive neocybernetic models can be for literary theory, offering a striking new way of studying the formal and social functions of narrative at the level of literary texts and the level of cultural practices.

Twentieth-Century Literature - Colin Milburn

In Bruce Clarke's remarkable book, narrative theory is transformed by a sustained encounter with neocybernetic systems theory. The result is a symbiogenesis as compelling as the hybrid sci-fi creatures Clarke engages–creatures we come to understand as playing surprisingly vital roles in thinking/linking/synching our complex social world to itself. For all students of narrative, Posthuman Metamorphosis will be indispensible–and inspiring!

Pratt Institute - Ira Livingston

A deft deployment of systems theory in the service of narrative and ecological understanding.”

University of Illinois, Chicago - Joseph Tabbi