S(t)imulating subjects: The mechanization of the body in postmodern discours

My project examines both canonical postmodern fiction by Pynchon, Barth and Reed, and lesser known feminist utopias by Piercy, Atwood and Charnas, to document the discursive construction of the body in the "Information Age." In my analyses I ground the widely held notion of the "self-reflexivity" of postmodern fiction in its ideological base--the commodification of information and the simultaneous call by the hegemonic culture for the abrogation of the body. Thus, my analyses focus on postmodern authors' portrayal of the cultural transformation of the body into an information technology.;In the initial chapters of the dissertation I explore various critical approaches to the postmodern (among them Lyotard on the postmodern condition, Baudrillard on simulation, and Haraway on cyborgs) with the purpose of arriving at a historically sound definition of contemporary western culture as a "cybernetic," or "information" episteme. Here I take a critical look at some of the documents that the founders of the computer revolution (Norbert Wiener and Claude E. Shannon, among others) wrote for wide circulation among the general public. I also lay down the theoretical trajectory for a feminist/historicist analysis that centers on the implications for marginalized and oppressed groups of the mechanization of the body.;In subsequent chapters I examine how the above mentioned postmodern novelists depict the conflict of the body as a textual commodity. Chapter Three takes two novels, Barth's Chimera and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, as politically distinct approaches to the dominance of information technologies over the body. Chapter Four is devoted entirely to Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow, for Pynchon, more than any other postmodern author, focuses on the specific historical interdiciplinary context that gave rise to the "postmodern condition." And finally, Chapter Five examines feminist utopias for their depiction of reproductive technologies as phallogocentric tools specifically targeting the female body.