Constructed and remade: Utopia, dystopia and the posthuman in China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels.

摘要

Vividly descriptive, unabashedly evocative, and inherently political, China Mieville's work has generated much critical discussion and scholarship about its genre-revolutionizing "unclassifiability" (Gordon Hybridity 456) and its ideological, reformist impulses. As a writer of the British Boom, Mieville exemplifies the "postmodern remix ethos" (Csicsery-Ronay 354), subjecting tradition and stereotypes to brutally honest investigation. Scholars like Sheryl Vint and William J. Burling credit Mieville with radicalizing fantasy and re-framing "fantastic writing as a blend of science fiction, Surrealism, fantasy, magical realism, and Lovecraftian horror that is attentive to both its pulp and its high culture influences and roots" (Vint 197). Mieville's Bas Lag novels -- Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council -- combine devices of fantasy and science fiction to create a retro-futuristic, steampunk world where identity emerges from the confluences of magic and technology.;In this project, I seek to explore posthuman identity in China Mieville's Bas Lag novels. I would like to examine the ways in which Mieville's fiction outlines the posthuman without succumbing to its attendant anxieties. Specifically, I look at the techno-magically constructed Remade and the sentient Construct Council as complex representations of posthuman identity that effectively embody the immanently dual - i.e. utopian and critical dystopian - impulses of the posthuman.