The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

underreading the narratives and their implications. Nor should we try to automatically reconstruct them as “secret” feminist texts. Instead weneed to carefully explore their complex position within the contexts of contemporary discourses.*******Thursday, March 22, 2012 4:00-5:30 p.m.42. (SF) Monstrous Posthuman Imaginings PineChair: Gerry CanavanDuke UniversityThe Monstrous Future: Freedom and the Posthuman Age in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies TrilogyRobert GadowskiUniversity of WrocławThe figure of the monster is universally recognized as a powerful cultural metaphor. Most scholars believe that the monster is not a meresignifier of the other, alien qualities, but rather performs the role of an avatar of humanity’s own anxieties and potentials. Significantly, asJeffrey Jerome Cohen emphasizes in his 1996 book Monster Theory: Reading Culture, “[m]onster notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kindof third term that problematizes the clash of extremes” (6). In this day and age humankind stands at the threshold of technologically mediatedtransformation from human to posthuman—a clash of two extremes bringing unprecedented consequences. Much as the monster, theposthuman belongs to a “break category” (Cohen x), a condition that has to be defined in order to be understood and then either embraced ordeplored. Such considerations are strongly present in popular culture, particularly in science fiction. In this paper I argue that ScottWesterfeld’s The Uglies trilogy can be seen as a narrative that sets a new paradigm for the argument that the posthuman condition and valuesit entails have yet to be determined. Informed by Cohen’s theories and by such penetrating approaches to the monster and the posthuman aspresented by Elaine L. Graham, Francis Fukuyama and Chris Hables Gray and others, my paper aims to reflect upon The Uglies trilogy as animportant narrative commenting on the possibilities of becoming posthuman.A Cancer in the Body Polity: Terrorism and Monstrosity in the Post-Human Novels of Neal AsherStan Hunter KrancThe Pennsylvania State UniversityThe thematic underpinning of much of science fiction is the conflict between protagonists and “monsters.” The works of British science fictionauthor Neal Asher problematize this conflict: in a post-human world, where form, identity, and even mind can be whimsically fluid, what trulycan be considered “monstrous”? Asher posits a near future civilization ruled by an oligarchy of all-seeing, all-powerful artificial intelligences.But, as seen through the eyes of characters human, machine, and something in between, Asher asks readers to imagine this government not asa dystopic and inhuman technocracy, but rather as a kind of post-human utopia, whose citizens have lost privacy and self government butgained economic freedom and security. Of course, the peace of Asher’s Polity universe is threatened by enemies both internal and external.The struggles of Ian Cormac, a human secret agent “gridlinked” to the AI rulers forms the unifying narrative of the series. This paper proposes arhetorical reading of these novels, focusing on the construction of a fundamentally moralistic conflict between Agent Cormac and themonstrous foes of the Polity. However, as both protagonists and antagonists are able to “reshape” their bodies and minds, readers are robbedof the traditional signifiers in identifying heroes and villains.Popping the Bubble of the Metaverse: Posthuman Control in Neal Stephenson’s Snow CrashMonica SedoreFlorida Atlantic UniversityNeal Stephenson’s third novel, Snow Crash, is one of the most popular works of cyberpunk science fiction. Though the novel was published in1992, several years before the Internet became a necessary tool in the late 90s, it still offers an eerie prologue to the world of technology usedby individuals in the twenty-first century. The main component of Stephenson’s novel is the Metaverse, a “computer-generated universe,” (24)into which one may be “goggled in” at any place, any time. My argument centers on the idea that in the Metaverse, the more freedom thecharacters believe they have achieved, the more control is actually exerted upon them. The two theoretical texts I will be relying on (andsubsequently merging) to frame my argument are Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We BecamePosthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. The setting of Snow Crash is both a carceral system and a posthumanworld. The Metaverse gives the characters their perceived freedom in the posthuman world, but the carceral system is what keeps them lockeddown.