Posthuman Metamorphosis Narrative and Systems Bruce Clarke $26.00 ISBN: 9780823228515 Book (Paperback) Fordham University Press 192 pages April 2008 Quantity:

“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 "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 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.

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