Mrinal Kanti Dutta, Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences for helping me to complete all the academic procedures effortlessly. The thesis as a whole examines how selected literary representations of emotional and existential anxiety and the agentic crisis experienced by bio-engineered lives enable us to reflect on the inadequacy of the existing medico-legal amendments to respond to complex bio -ethical issues related to notions of human subjectivity, personhood and citizenship.
What it Means to be a Human in the Age of Genetic Engineering
In an article entitled “Crossing the Uncanny Valley” (2018), Siobhan Lyons argues that “the uncanny realism of the robots in Westworld brings us to an uncanny valley.”5 Problematizing the binary between human and nonhuman evokes a sense of unknowability because it threatens the legitimacy and multivalue of humans as sentient and active beings. 5Siobhan Lyons, “Crossing the Uncanny Valley: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” in Westworld and Philosophy, edited by James B.
Literature Review and Research Gap Explored in this Thesis
Johnson argues that bioethics as a discipline was founded with the aim of responding to the limitations of traditional medical ethics, which failed to address the challenges posed by today's biotechnology culture. Mosser and Braun draw on the theories of posthuman ethics to explore how the concept of humanity is reconfigured as a result of the human-machine interface.40 Mosser studies the fictional.
Objectives and the Rationale of the Research
This research aims to highlight how the dualistic understanding of the human self is interrogated in selected literary texts, emphasizing the embodied understanding of humanity. The research also aims to explore the socio-cultural and political status of the bioengineered lives produced and classified as biomedical waste (disposable entities) by capitalist consumer culture.
Research Questions
Literary Texts Chosen for this Research and their Rationale
Similarly, Kureishi's novella foregrounds a feature of the current culture of disposable consumerism, where the biotech industry has turned certain disadvantaged sections of society into biocommodities, which are purchased by wealthy consumer clientele for therapeutic and cosmetic purposes. Literary works are created as a critique of the extreme form of biomedical reification promoted by the process of biocapitalization.
Organization of Chapters and an Overview of how the Chosen Literary Texts are Read in this Research
Chapter I- “Was I then a monster”: Deterritorialization, Personhood and Kinship: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Introduction
Scholars such as Margaret Homan and Barbara Johnson have discussed Shelley's Frankenstein as a critique of the institution of parenthood.11 Like Moers, Johnson argues that bioscientist Frankenstein's disgust for his offspring, as dramatized in the novel, puts foreground the mutual relationship between parenting and parenting. The first part of the chapter aims to examine the epistemological mutation in the field of medical science as captured in Shelley's Frankenstein.13 The notion of epistemological mutation is introduced and explained by Nicholas Rose in The Politics of Life Vet (2007) as the transition in meaning socio- cultural and medico-legal life.
Re-configuring Biology as a Science of Life
In the initial phase of his medical career, Victor Frankenstein's approach to studying the natural phenomena correlates with the concept of life as explained by the British materialist William Lawrence. The notion of instrumentalization of life is linked to the process of bioscientific reification as dramatized in Shelley's Frankenstein.
Deterritorialization of the Bionormative Concept of Family
The emotional state is caused by entities that disrupt the normative epistemic structure of the human conceptual scheme. An analogy can be drawn between Frankenstein's creation of the creature and Haraway's discussion of the evolving human-machine relationship in 'A Cyborg Manifesto' (2001).
Bioengineering, Bioethics, and Citizenship
David Marshall argues that the unclassifiable body of the creature can be interpreted as a mirroring problem. Kavey, Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives (New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2016) 192.
Conclusion
Introduction
The novels dramatize the liminal state of the brain-dead patients, which problematizes our normative notion of life, death and their distinction. Braidottis offers a hybridized, fragmented and non-unitary concept of human subjectivity that serves as a critique of the liberal humanist subject as an organic whole. This chapter will focus on how developments in the organ transplant domain have enabled us to reconceptualize the importance of the body in the (re)construction of human subjectivity.
Contested and Ambiguous Nature of Brain-Dead Phenomenon
Priscille Sibley's Stardust Promise dramatizes the ambiguous nature of the brain death phenomenon by featuring the borderline status of Elle Lenore, who was eight weeks old. Miller's article titled "Do the 'brain-dead' just seem to be alive" (2017) can be argued that the technologically mediated body of the brain-dead patient problematizes the binary between appearance and reality. The cognitive dissonance experienced by the characters observing a patient diagnosed as brain dead in The Stardust Promise corresponds to Lesley Sharp's anthropological study of brain dead patients who are biomedically classified as cadaveric organ donors.
Brain-Dead Patients as Disposable Entities
Bellows is portrayed as an embodiment of hegemonic Western biomedical knowledge, which is oblivious to Nancy's unrefined human quality. An analogy can be drawn between the realized and available status of brain-dead patients who are not recognized as persons in Cook's Coma and Lesley Sharp's study of brain-dead patients. Hogle argues that amid biotechnological apparatuses, the individuality and agency of brain-dead patients are consumed and compromised.
Deterritorialized and Entangled Subjectivity
The biological devices connected to the brain-dead patients' bodies simulate their bodies'. The tangled subjectivity of the brain-dead patients enables us to reconsider the importance of embodiment in the construction of the human self and subjectivity. Cook's Coma sheds light on how the body of the mortal organ donor kept on a respirator problematizes the notion of human subjectivity that we theoretically associate with a unified understanding of biological embodiment.
Embodied and Hybridized Subjectivity
He emphasizes the subjective experiences and the bodily dimension of the human self and defies the notion of the human body as a processing machine. The received heart embodies the spectral presence of the donor's identity, which has profoundly affected her autobiographical self. The literal blurring of the self and the other as dramatized in Picoult's novel can be.
Conclusion
Introduction
This chapter argues that Kureishi's "Body" and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go can be interpreted as critiques of the neo-cannibalistic culture of capitalism8, which turns the human body into a disposable commodity that is then turned into biomedical garbage. Bauman argues that the part of the population classified as non-citizens can be described as lost lives. The second part of the chapter will deal with the socio-cultural and political status of human clones, who are not recognized as persons and are therefore not granted civil rights.
Biocitizenship and Wasted Lives
68Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Ends of the Body: Commodities, Fetishism, and the Global Organ Trade." In the novel, Ishiguro does not provide a complex portrayal of the characters of the underclass people who are exploited for bioscientific experiments such as human cloning. In this context, the term underclass refers to a section of people who are considered the fringes of society.
The Clones’ Classification as Biomedical Trash
In an article titled "Scalpel and Metaphor" (2015), Sara Wasson argues that Ishiguro's novel offers an ontological affinity between the life of the clones and the discarded trash. In Ishiguro's novel, the human clones metaphorically as well as literally inhabit the edges of the social structure and the normative human conceptual order. Bare life and the camps in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go” (2013) Arne De Boever draws a parallel between Agamben's concept of bare life and the life of the clones dramatized in Ishiguro's novel.
Conclusion
Introduction
In The Future of Human Nature (2003), Jurgen Habermas criticizes the practice of genetic programming, arguing that the autonomy offered to parents to reconfigure the child's genetic configuration has created "dedifferentiation" between the born and the made. Jacob argues that in the current culture of artificial reproductive technology, there is a revival of the concept of "virgin conception" (70). Desai's novel sheds light on how, in the current culture of neoliberal consumerism, parents are unwittingly transformed into consumers of bioengineered babies, and the surrogates are seen as collateral and indispensable entities exploited by the fertility industry to produce babies delivered to the wealthy white clientele.
Reinforcing the Bionormative Concept of Family-Making
It contributes to the breaking down of humanist barricades in the rising tides of post-humanity.”33. In the current culture of genetic engineering, we are seeing a resurgence of the proprietary concept of parenthood, perpetuated by biotechnological practices such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which allow parents to configure and reconfigure desired genetic traits in a child they engineer in vitro. fertilization (IVF). Desai's fictional exploration of the politics of parenthood in the current culture of reproductive medicine is in line with the arguments of Dorothy Roberts, discussed in an article entitled "Race and the New Reproduction" (1996).
Revival of Neoliberal Eugenics in the Era of Artificial Reproductive Technology
Rose argues that in the current culture of ethnopolitics, the molecular biopolitics is not guided by state-led policies of population control and improvement of the national stock. In his book, Lifton examines the "biomedical vision as a central psychohistorical principle of the Nazi regime and the psychological behavior of the individual doctors". Desai's fictional representation of the race-caste-based preferences made by the prospective parents sheds light on how sections of people are seen as the producers of the.
Conclusion
The fictional representations of the dehumanized and non-agentic status of the posthuman bodies and human clones in Kureishi's 'The Body' and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go provide us with space to speculate on the issues of bioethics, agency and humanity that are problematized in the current culture of genetic engineering and organ transplantation. Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’” In Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, 168-183. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In The History of Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, 83-222.
