Posthuman Bodies in Post-War Fiction - Detailseite

Module 4, 5250009 / Module ELC, 5250009i: Posthuman Bodies in Post-War Fiction

This seminar explores how technology challenges traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality in literature and scientific texts following World War II. As artificial intelligence and technological personhood emerged as prominent themes in post-war cultural imagination, authors began questioning the boundaries of what constitutes human identity and consciousness. Through figures like the android and cyborg, as well as concepts such as cyberspace, these texts investigate the increasingly blurred line between human and machine.

In the first part of the seminar, we will engage with key posthumanist theoretical frameworks from the 1980s and 1990s, establishing a conceptual foundation for our literary analysis. In the second part, we will apply these theoretical insights as we examine how the aforementioned technological innovations destabilise conventional understandings of the body, gender expression, and sexuality. Through reading Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), James Tiptree Jr.'s The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973), and William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), we will analyse how these texts reimagine human embodiment and identity in technologically mediated futures.

Please acquire copies of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Neuromancer. I am using the SF Masterworks editions, but others are fine, too.

All other texts will be provided on Moodle.