Graduation Semester and Year

2014

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Kenneth M Roemer

Abstract

In this thesis, I focus on posthumanist theory, utopia, and the evolving portrayal of technology in the novels of Edward Bellamy, Margaret Atwood, and Joan Slonczewski. The main argument of this thesis is that there is a posthumanist potential within utopia that can be seen as fermenting within Bellamy's Looking Backward as a way to eliminate social stratification, showing potentiality within Atwood's Oryx and Crake as a way to open up an other-than-human agency in the form of transgenic organisms, and becoming fully realized in Slonczewski's A Door Into Ocean through an all-female, alien civilization that is fully grounded in a material posthumanist world-view of reciprocity, balance, and embeddedness within a larger web of life. In terms of methodology, I draw out this potential posthumanism by focusing on how technology is portrayed in the context of each novel's categorization in the utopian genre. Specifically, where the relatively traditional and simple utopian form of Looking Backward portrays technology as an abstracted, inevitable force of utopia, both Oryx and Crake and A Door Into Ocean reflect transformations within the utopian genre that result in more complex works, thus portraying equally complex views of technology and scientific epistemologies as intimately tied to social structure, philosophy, and world-view. The result is that technology can be seen as an intrinsically good, driving force of utopia in Looking Backward, a more complex biotechnological tool of transcendence for humanity and a possible path to either utopia or dystopia in Oryx and Crake, or fully integrated into a posthumanist society in A Door Into Ocean, whose posthumanist philosophy of reciprocity and material embeddedness quells the transcendent nature of technology and leads to a fully realized posthumanist eutopia.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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