This essay aims to examine complexity of posthumanism and beyond by investigating genealogically meaning of use and existential foundation of affective android, Klara, in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Klara and the Sun. As theoretical framework, this essay utilizes mostly Giorgio Agamben's genealogical and comprehensive study on the discourse of use and apparatus of anthropological machine in Use of Bodies. Klara, so-called AF (Artificial Friend), is an android that parents buy to provide children with companionship. Klara has tactful ability in detecting human emotions and feelings as well as surreptitiously having and expressing her own. Klara accidentally bears witness to three miraculous events related to the Sun and begins to believe that the Sun has power to resurrect the dead. Josie, Klara's teenager master, has an illness that can kill her. Klara, a meticulous observer, learns more about human emotions, feelings, and relations to become a sentient android who unveils the affective relations, especially love and loneliness, between human/machine bodies. Klara transcends her own existential ground and sacrifice herself to show how the ontological threshold between human and machine is compromised by anthropological machine. Klara in the end becomes an android-Dasein.

This paper aims to analyze Kate Chopin's The Awakening from the perspective of Jacques Lacan's theory of desire. In The Awakening, the main character Edna Pontellier's attempt to pursue individual autonomy against the patriarchal ideology of the 19th century reveals the aspect of the Lacanian subject of desire to explore the origin of the being beyond the position of the subject defined by the patriarchal symbolic order. The trigger that sparked Edna's desire for the freedom of the being was a brief love affair with a young man she met at the resort, but her desire is ultimately directed to finding her own position in the universe as an autonomous individual not belonging to anyone. According to Lacan, the subject in the symbolic order is an empty one with a lack or void inside it as 'objet a' considered the real subject. This 'objet a' acts as the object-cause of desire that causes the subject to continuously desire something through the metonymic chain of desires projected onto objects in the real world. In the process of exploring her own position in the universe, Edna tries to go beyond the laws and prohibitions of the symbolic order as a subject of desire, experiencing 'Death drive' accompanied by Jouissance, which inevitably leads to her destruction and actual death. The essential thing Edna feels she can never give up until the very last moment is her desire to approach her own being. In this sense, Edna, who seeks to pursue her own desires to the end against all social punishments and prohibitions, can be said to be an example of the Lacanian 'ethical subject' who tries to go where the subject used to be.

This essay examines how Costello's speech in “The Problem of Evil” (Lesson 6 of Elizabeth Costello) stands in relation to the ethics of witnessing as well as her own discourse on the unbounded sympathetic imagination in “The Lives of Animals” (Lesson 3 and 4). While her claim in “The Lives of Animals” has moral and ethical implications, it runs counter to the ethics of witnessing, which, revolving around the unrepresentable other, surely sets limits on our imagination, if not on our sympathy. On the face of it, Costello's critique in “The Problem of Evil” of Paul West's “obscene” description of the Nazi executioner and the executed seems to reinstate the ethics of witnessing. On a deeper level, her response complicates, rather than simply cancel, the question of the sympathetic imagination by turning it from the ethics of the representation of the other into what might be called the affective politics of mimesis. It is not “the other,” the victims of the evil, but the author and the reader, and their affects, that she really cares about in this phase. The question is further complicated by the narrative devices that undermine the authenticity of her words and feelings. No final word is given by the story, which remains an illustration of the suffering that the “embodied soul” of the author as a “secretary of the invisible” has to undergo.

This paper explores the affective, material, and relational turns of Japanese-Americans assimilating into the postwar US in the 1950s as a hybridized and diversified multiplicity, or assemblage, of heterogeneous bodies, actors, and materials. Specifically, it aims to investigate how those called no-no boys in John Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy strive to or fail to normate, the disability of their bodily and psychological materialities rendered negated in the American fifties. This historical novel depicts different ways in which the second generation of Japanese-American descent returns and assimilates themselves into everyday life as a site of totality where they are subject to racism, heteronormativity, and family ideology. The American 50s is a decade known for the era of conformity, while the fear of nuclear war spread and the Cold War logic of containment and integration prevailed. In Okada's narrative, no-no-boy Ichiro Yamada is drawn to a desire for a normate American by removing the innate yet no longer tenable Japanese materials from his body, subjectivity, and agency. Thus, the no-no-boy generation attempts material and relational turns for existential survival by adapting to or coalescing into the postwar US assemblage against the backdrop of the Cold War regime of a transpacific American Empire. That said, this paper engages in the materialist approach to Okada's ableist narrative specific to the material and relational turns of Japanese America to normate the negated materiality of its Japaneseness, which belongs to neither America nor Japan. Through this, this study traces how the Japanese American body co-opts the eugenic ideology of ableism of the day to achieve the “point of wholeness and belonging” in the unique blending in America of history, ideology, and memory during the 1950s.

The significance of this article lies in discussing if a stylometric analysis can bring out to critical attention certain formal features of a text whose obvious presence traditional critics may miss out, engrossed in reading the details of the textual interior closely. Thus this article initially gauges the stylistic distances, that is, similarities and differences, among a large corpus composed of British domestic and adventure novels. Then it proceeds to testing whether or not such thematic elements as solidarity, belonging, and bonding, which traditional scholars attributed to Heart of Darkness, may be detectable in a stylometric analysis as well. Based on the lists of most frequent words and keywords, this article argues that Marlow, the first person narrator, comes across as someone deprived of both the significant Other and comforting social networks, one who finds himself in an anomie-like situation due to his failure to comprehend the alien environment, not to mention joining a meaningful, reassuring community. A quantitative analysis reveals that Marlow is not even in a situation in which he can properly receive and process audiovisual signals and data from the outer world. Given this situation, it is not surprising that the first plural pronoun “we,” the word that strongly indicates an individual's sense of belonging, is ranked at the top three in the negative keyword list of the novella, that is to say, the list of keywords most avoided by the author. The conclusion of this paper is that if a community or solidarity makes itself a felt presence in this novella, it is due to its painful absence.

This paper aims to investigate the posthuman ethics through the narrative of an avant-garde musician Peter Els's biocomposing in Richard Powers' Orfeo. By accepting that Richard Bonner embodies Els's 'Music of the Sphere' as the verbal music, Els recognizes the importance of the communication with others and the communal solidarity. Els's biomusic shows that the words are not the 'absolute' form, but permeate into the music, allowing the readers to experience the music vibrantly. This novel suggests that the biomusic can be embodied as the life form by the aesthetics of transgenic art. Its strategies show that life and art have the interchangeability. Powers offers the possibility of the fluid and multiple subjectivity in the vital posthuman vision through Els's biocomposing, which considers the connectivity of life and art and the co-evolution of human and non-human, escaping from the anthropocentric unified and confined subjectivity. Els obsesses with the desire to compose the 'Music of the Earth.' Els intends to make the informative organism, inscribing the musical code into the bacterial DNA. Unfortunately, the bio-art experiment in his home lab triggers the actions of federal forces, DHS, which casts suspicions to him as a bioterrorist, causing Els to flee westwards across USA, to avoid the indictment of the Patriot Act. Els's transgenic piece can not but fail because it cannot be heard as the aesthetic form. In the end, Els's performing the biomusic as a verbal music shows that his music is able to attain the vitality. Els posts his composition method on Twitter message, accepting his collaborator Bonner's advice. In conclusion, Powers emphasizes the importance of communication, as the readers listen to the biomusic and perceive the vitality by the imagination. As a way to escape from the data-dominated surveillance system, Powers asserts the posthuman ethics that we should create the network society, where vitality, diversity and sustainability are emphasized.

Description has been given a marginal status in the studies of the novel and narrative. It has been regarded by critics and novelists alike as an element of 'bad writing' that fails to amount to any substantial or complex meaning. With the increasing interest in the discourses of big data, the Anthropocene, and posthumanism, however, studies in social science have started to pay attention to the possibilities of the descriptive mode as an ethical tool to account for the vast continuum of the non-human world. Descriptive mode provides the writer/reader with a 'close but not deep' look into the object, which does not attempt to conquer or 'humanize' it. Aiming to apply such insight into literary analysis, I suggest that the early twentieth century novel was the place where writers experimented with the descriptive mode to portray the ontological model alternative to the traditional notion of the 'human.' To examine this point, this paper focuses on the strategy of characterization in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, wherein characters are rendered opaque and lack of interiority, which places them in continuity with non-human objects and forms of life. The descriptive mode of writing that characterizes Marlow's narratives complicates what it means to be human, which also undermines the imperialist project based on the ideologies of humanism.

This article analyzes how the racial climate of the postwar decades in metropolitan areas is illustrated in Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring. Geographical spaces feature systematic spatialization of space and geographical gentrification. Alluding to such US minority slum areas as Detroit, Hopkinson uses the science fiction genre of zombie apocalypse to describe class hierarchies alongside color lines in a Caribbean Canadian community in this organ-trafficking story. The novel employs the conventions of spirit-possession and zombie narrative to highlight the way slums in modern metropolises have been made into spaces of racial segregation. By setting a modern city as a default background to explore race dynamics in the post-Jim Crow era, Brown Girl in the Ring locates twentieth-century US race histories within a cultural climate where industrial transformation, techno-scientific progress, and geographical modernization have underwritten racial dynamics in a supposedly post-racial world.

Yaa Gyasi in her latest novel Transcendent Kingdom (2020) illuminates a shrinking Ghanaian family endeavoring to survive in seemingly post-racial contemporary American society. Noticeable about the novel is that it does not seem to offer a solution for its protagonist and narrator Gifty, given that she eventually concedes that neither her scientific knowledge nor reflection on evangelical religion alone clearly expounds on the catalysts and repercussions of her brother's death induced by his opioid addiction and her mother's depression. More attention needs to be paid to the impossibility of elucidating the fundamental causes of her family's agony in order to interpret it as more than an ineluctable tragedy, since Gifty gradually becomes willing to rely on others like Katherine and Han. Taking such implicative importance of further analyzing the protagonist's failure of “mak[ing] meaning” as a point of departure (Gyasi 198), I in this paper seek to shed light on the complicated relationship between Gifty and her mother which is replete with mental sufferings mainly based on the conceptualization of affect advanced by several prominent scholars, such as Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed. I specifically construe Gifty's epiphany that her scientific and/or religious approach makes Nana's death and the Black Mamba's depression more inexplicable as an epitome of the affective dimensions of race. In light of the diverse and even ambivalent affective facets of race, I ultimately suggest that depression ironically functions as a cornerstone for subversion which repudiates societal standards of when and how they are supposed to be (made) happy in contemporary society.