Trans/Post-humanist Poetics in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Patrycja Podgajna

doi:10.18290/rh.2018.66.11s-7

Patrycja Podgajna Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh.2018.66.11s-7

Keywords: transhumanism; posthumanism; dystopia; post-postmodernism; human/non-human relations

Abstract

Among various philosophical and cultural paradigms, it is transhumanism and posthumanism that increasingly foreground the impact of technological and bioscientific advancements on the concept of mankind. Although conceptually divergent, these two theoretical approaches serve to convey respectively utopian and dystopian tensions in Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods (2007) in which technology is presented both as a tool of progress and destruction. Scrutinizing the interplay between the transhumanist and posthumanist poetics, the aim of this paper is to analyze the role of technology in reconfigurating the traditional idea of the human. By projecting a dystopian vision of excessive technological advancements, Winterson not only foregrounds the issue of dehumanization in a post-anthropocentric world, but she also implies a possibility of redemption through a new form of human/non-human connectedness, which constitutes a post-postmodern turn in her novel.

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