Cyberpunk Essay
BookRags Literature Criticism
Critical Essay by John Fekete
For the online version of BookRags' Critical Essay by John Fekete Literature Criticism, including complete copyright information, please visit:
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Copyright Information
©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
©2000-2011 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Critical Essay by John Fekete
SOURCE: "The Post-Liberal Mind/Body, Postmodern Fiction, and the Case of Cyberpunk SF," in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 58, November, 1992, pp. 395-403.
In the following essay, Fekete reviews the volume Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, providing a brief overview of the cyberpunk movement.
We see through eyeglasses and contacts; we eat with dentures. We remove cataracts and replace the lenses. We insert video cameras inside our bodies to aid in "keyhole" surgery; we remove our gall bladders and throw them away. We replace our hearts, kidneys, and livers with other organs: human, baboon, or manufactured. By diet or surgery, we change the shapes of our breasts, faces, torsos. We transform inoperable brain tumors genetically into things we can destroy chemically. We abort fetuses, and create new life in vitro. And these are just the medical interventions. We also time-shift our simulation programming on television, put disembodied interlocutors on hold on our telephones, and post messages in electronic space through our computer modems. We jog through our cities acoustically jacked into our Walkmans.
We live through our technologies, as McLuhan says, mythically and in depth, everywhere and everywhen. Technologies are us. But we keep under control our anxieties about how close to our bodies and inner lives our technologies have gotten by keeping fragmented our awareness of an amplified new interface between machinery and the human body. By the same
Critical Essay by John Fekete
For the online version of BookRags' Critical Essay by John Fekete Literature Criticism, including complete copyright information, please visit:
http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/cyberpunk_01/
Copyright Information
©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
©2000-2011 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Critical Essay by John Fekete
SOURCE: "The Post-Liberal Mind/Body, Postmodern Fiction, and the Case of Cyberpunk SF," in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 58, November, 1992, pp. 395-403.
In the following essay, Fekete reviews the volume Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, providing a brief overview of the cyberpunk movement.
We see through eyeglasses and contacts; we eat with dentures. We remove cataracts and replace the lenses. We insert video cameras inside our bodies to aid in "keyhole" surgery; we remove our gall bladders and throw them away. We replace our hearts, kidneys, and livers with other organs: human, baboon, or manufactured. By diet or surgery, we change the shapes of our breasts, faces, torsos. We transform inoperable brain tumors genetically into things we can destroy chemically. We abort fetuses, and create new life in vitro. And these are just the medical interventions. We also time-shift our simulation programming on television, put disembodied interlocutors on hold on our telephones, and post messages in electronic space through our computer modems. We jog through our cities acoustically jacked into our Walkmans.
We live through our technologies, as McLuhan says, mythically and in depth, everywhere and everywhen. Technologies are us. But we keep under control our anxieties about how close to our bodies and inner lives our technologies have gotten by keeping fragmented our awareness of an amplified new interface between machinery and the human body. By the same