Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems - Softcover

Clarke, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823228517 ISBN 13: 9780823228515

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and chair of the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. In 2010–11 he was senior fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. His books are Allegories of Writing (1995), Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996), Energy Forms (2001), Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008), and Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014). He has coedited From Energy to Information (2002), Emergence and Embodiment (2009), and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2010). He is now writing a cultural history of the American locations, transnational authors, and key concepts of the systems discourses gathered in the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly.

Review:

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 Twentieth-Century Literature)

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

(―Joseph Tabbi University of Illinois, Chicago)

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

(―Mark Hansen University of Chicago)

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!

(―Ira Livingston Pratt Institute)

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 Rice University)

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0823228517
• ISBN 13: 9780823228515
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192