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.
| BRUCE CLARKE is Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas
Tech 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 Marsden
and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Energy Forms: Allegory and Science
in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics; and, co-edited with Linda Dalrymple Henderson,
From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. |