Overview

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.

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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 Draws on the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and other theorists in a study of narratives of bodily metamorphosis. 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

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 Draws on the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and other theorists in a study of narratives of bodily metamorphosis. 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

Author Information

BRUCE CLARKE is Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at TexasTech 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 Marsdenand Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Energy Forms: Allegory and Sciencein 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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