Often debates over literary meaning can get swept up into larger discussions about social significance, political responsibilities, identity struggles and deification of cultural objects. Literary meaning becomes, in these deliberations, not just a theoretical entity but a powerful social force. All of these queries, however, inasmuch as the literary enterprise is a part of human interaction, are dependent on the brute fact of communication. Any notion of literary meaning must ultimately rest upon a concept of meaning that explains, or attempts to explain, how communication is possible. This, in turn, leads down the dark path into human psychology and the relationships of our minds to the world around us. This thesis will attempt to explore various viewpoints about the connections between thought, language, and literature and to argue that these connections necessitate more attention than has been paid to them by literary theorists.

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Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler argue that human perception relies on a form, or gestalt, into which perceptions are assimilated. Gestalt theory has been applied to the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim and to literature by Wolfgang Iser. My original contribution to knowledge is to use gestalt theory to perform literary criticism, an approach that highlights the importance of perception in William Gibson's novels and the impact of this emphasis on posthumanism and science fiction studies. Science fiction addresses the problem of difference and the relationship between self and other. Gestalt literary criticism takes perception as the interface between the self and the other, the human and the inhuman. Gibson's work is of particular interest as his early novels are representative of 1980s cyberpunk while his later novels push the boundaries of science fiction through their contemporary settings. By engaging with Gibson the thesis makes its contribution to contemporary science fiction criticism explicit. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy autopoiesis defines life and consciousness, elevating the importance of perception (Chapter I). The Bridge trilogy uses the metaphor of chaos theory to examine dialectic tensions, such as the tension between space and cyberspace (Chapter II). Faulty pattern recognition is a key theme in Gibson's post-9/11 work as gestalt perception allows and limits knowledge (Chapter III). Chapter IV explains how the gestalt in psychoanalysis creates a fragmented subject in Spook Country (2007). Finally, the gestalt appears as a parallax view, a view that oscillates between the world we experience and the world as represented in the text (Chapter V). I conclude that gestalt literary criticism offers an exciting new reading of Gibson's work that recognises its engagement with visual culture and cyberpunk as a whole.