The Self-Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative

Yaszak, Lisa. The Self-Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative. LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY: OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS. NYC: Routledge, 2002.

Reviewed by Nicola Nixon, "Belated Cyborgs, Science Fiction Studies #100 = 33.3 (November 2006): 554-57, our source here.

Nixon's review opens with Nixon's reading of the scene in James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's ALIENS where Ripley re-enters to take on the Alien Queen, Ripley inside a commercial-loader mechanical (electronic, cybernetic?) exoskeleton. "Up to this point, Ripley has been, in cyberpunk parlance, all meat — [...] — but here, in the carapace of the loader, she is the technologically-enhanced figure of the cyborg [...]." The android Bishop to Ripley after she's killed the Alien Queen: "'Not bad, for a human.'" Nixon believes that in several ways "Ripley in the loader seems [...] the techno-embodiment of the sublime and grotesque cyborg Donna Haraway celebrated in her famous" (in academic circles) "'Manifesto for Cyborgs' published in Socialist Review in 1985, the year before Cameron's film appeared" (Erlich added the reference to Gale Anne Hurd: Cameron's producer). And Nixon is disappointed that Yaszek didn't handle ALIENS, even though spreading her net wide enough to bring in Steven Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK (1993).

"Haraway figures large in Yaszek's book, given that its stated project is to 'contribute to the development of a new narrative genre: 'cyborg writing'" Other works Yaszak handles that may be of interest to users of this Wiki:

• Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49[1]
• Joanna Russ's The Female Man
• Octavia Butler's Kindred[2]
• William Gibson's Neuromancer (also Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive
• Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
• Pat Cadigan's Synners
• Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER — and, as mentioned, Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK.

Nixon especially recommends the chapter in The Self Wired that "focusses on what Yaszek calls the 'literally hybrid or cyborg other' (95) whom she conceives smartly as, above all, a worker. [...] Gibson's CYBERSPACE TRILOGY [...], Stephenson's Snow Crash, and Caddigan's Synners offer examples of Haraway's figure of the 'ironic cyborg,' who is always connected to mutiple narratives of work and identity" (p. 556).

RDE, finishing, 4Nov22