From bildungsroman to geschäftsroman: the posthuman neoliberal novel
The emergence of posthumanism and the proliferation of neoliberal rationality have not only changed the meaning of the word human, but also the status of the human. Technological autonomy overpowers and replaces human agency and the human becomes marginal and peripheral on a planetary scale; i...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2021
|
| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17264/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17264/1/43565-156876-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | The emergence of posthumanism and the proliferation of neoliberal rationality have not only
changed the meaning of the word human, but also the status of the human. Technological
autonomy overpowers and replaces human agency and the human becomes marginal and
peripheral on a planetary scale; in the same manner that humans have lost control over the
machine, they have also lost control over their agentic narrative on a global scale and on a
literary one. And in the same way neoliberal commodification reduces humans to non-humans
and transforms technology to a transcendent other that can transform and control the body,
neoliberal posthumanism transformed the genre of the novel. The authors argue that the
decentralization of the human, triggered by posthumanism, and the commodification of the
genre of the novel, triggered by neoliberalism, transformed the most popular subgenre of the
novel, the bildungsroman into a geschäftsroman. There is considerable evidence that indicates
that many contemporary novels no longer focus on the growth of human beings, but rather on
the growth of businesses, instead. This paper analyzes Mohsin Hamid’s How to get Filthy Rich
in Rising Asia (2013), arguing that it is a poignant example of a geschäftsroman, in which the
human is decentralized and the growth of the city and the development of the economy become
the narrative’s nucleus. |
|---|