Abstract
This dissertation intends to illustrate the ways in which postcyberpunk – the often ignored offshoot of the short-lived science fiction (SF) subgenre, cyberpunk – revises the technophobic preoccupations that usually characterise cyberpunk’s depictions of the posthuman. Posthumanism – understood here as a merging of biology and technology to a point where the human becomes something other than human – is frequently envisioned by cyberpunk as a dystopian condition in which the human/machine merger is a negative transformation that does irreparable harm to the human subject. I argue that postcyberpunk, on the other hand, depicts posthumanism as a potentially positive transformation that offers humanity an opportunity to redesign and reimagine itself. To this end I rely on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the utopian enclave, which he defines in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2007), as a space wherein both utopian and dystopian fantasies can take shape. I posit that posthumanism is one such an enclave, in demonstration of which I offer a reading of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) – considered by a number of scholars to be the seminal cyberpunk novel – comparing it to Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 postcyberpunk animated film Kôkaku kidôtai (Ghost in the Shell). In so doing I illustrate how each text offers differing views on posthumanism, as envisioned in the figure of the cyborg, as well as in disembodied cyberspace consciousnesses, as a transformation that either threatens humanity, as in Neuromancer, or, as in Ghost in the Shell, one that offers exciting new possibilities for human existence.
M.A. (English)