Cyberpunk's attempt to imagine the futures that the expanding communications networks will shape, as explored in Sterling's Islands in the Net and Stephenson's The Diamond Age, discovers that the boundaries between the machine and human, the natural and artificial, and the past and present have never been as clear as the modern realist schematic has drawn them. Gothic literature represents transgressions of these boundaries as threatening to the self, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the node where the gothic is dismembered and sutured into science fiction, and the modern self faces its monstrous double. Yet if boundaries are represented as sites of interface, gothic threats become opportunities for growth and generation. Individual texts, even realist ones, have always sutured together intertextual ingredients. Jane Eyre offers an alternative model for constructing the subject through sorting texts, a technique which emerges through cyberpunk as the essential survival skill of the future self.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.83839 |
Date | January 2005 |
Creators | Rose, Margaret Anne |
Publisher | McGill University |
Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Format | application/pdf |
Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
Relation | alephsysno: 002271537, proquestno: AAIMR22619, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds