Posthuman Metamorphosis

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and chair of the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. In 2010–11 he was senior fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. His books are Allegories of Writing (1995), Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996), Energy Forms (2001), Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008), and Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014). He has coedited From Energy to Information (2002), Emergence and Embodiment (2009), and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2010). He is now writing a cultural history of the American locations, transnational authors, and key concepts of the systems discourses gathered in the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly.

"In Bruce Clarke's remarkable book, narrative theory is transformed by a sustained encounter with neocybernetic systems theory. The result is a symbiogenesis as compelling as the hybrid sci-fi creatures Clarke engages-creatures we come to understand as playing surprisingly vital roles in thinking/linking/synching our complex social world to itself. For all students of narrative, Posthuman Metamorphosis will be indispensible-and inspiring!" -- -Ira Livingston Pratt Institute "Draws on the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and other theorists in a study of narratives of bodily metamorphosis." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "A deft deployment of systems theory in the service of narrative and ecological understanding." -- -Joseph Tabbi University of Illinois, Chicago "The first book-length study devoted to an important and fruitful convergence of social-informational theory and narratology." -- -Mark Hansen University of Chicago "Clarke's wide-ranging and vibrant writing indicates how transformative and productive neocybernetic models can be for literary theory, offering a striking new way of studying the formal and social functions of narrative at the level of literary texts and the level of cultural practices." -- -Colin Milburn Twentieth-Century Literature "Fasten your seat belts. Bruce Clarke's Posthuman Metamophosis takes us from 0 to 60-or in this case, from Ovid to Octavia Butler-at warp speed, ranging across a stunning array of texts, theories, and imagined universes to unpack the intellectual background, theoretical contours, land ethical and political stakes of the posthuman. Neither glibly celebratory nor polemically moralizing, Clarke's rendering of the posthuman is itself a model of interdisciplinary posthumanist scholarship, deftly comparing interpretive frames from media theory, systems theory, biology, narratology, and much else besides, to provide us with an experiment in reading that is, itself, metamorphic." -- -Cary Wolfe Rice University