Book contents
- The Prosthetic Imagination
- The Prosthetic Imagination
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish
- Part II The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe
- Part III The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker
- Part IV The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett
- Part V The Posthuman Body: From Orwell to Atwood
- Chapter 8 Prosthetics and Simulacra: The Postmodern Novel
- Chapter 9 Prosthetic Worlds in the Twenty-First-Century Novel
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - Prosthetics and Simulacra: The Postmodern Novel
from Part V - The Posthuman Body: From Orwell to Atwood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- The Prosthetic Imagination
- The Prosthetic Imagination
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish
- Part II The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe
- Part III The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker
- Part IV The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett
- Part V The Posthuman Body: From Orwell to Atwood
- Chapter 8 Prosthetics and Simulacra: The Postmodern Novel
- Chapter 9 Prosthetic Worlds in the Twenty-First-Century Novel
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the relation between the novel form and the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism and posthumanism in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the relation between the prosthetic and the simulacral, under postmodern conditions, and with the technological revolution associated with the advent of computing. The novel, it suggests, from Orwell to Brooke-Rose, is involved in a difficult relationship with postmodernism, one which gives expression to its possibilities, while also seeking to resist its erosion of the materiality of our cultures and environments. It traces a strand of experimental realism in the postwar novel that is at odds with the terms in which we have conceived of postmodern fiction. It then goes on to read two of the novelists who are associated with the postmodern novel – Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison – to suggest that one can detect a persistent opposition in their work between the simulacrum and the prosthetic, one which helps us see past some of the contradictions that are the result of our existing accounts of postmodern politics and aesthetics.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Prosthetic ImaginationA History of the Novel as Artificial Life, pp. 287 - 318Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020