This thesis examines representations of human and nonhuman bodies in techno-saturated, late capitalist urban cityscapes in two contemporary works of speculative fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Klara and the Sun" (2021) and Roy Miki’s "Mannequin Rising" (2011). In its reading of "Klara and the Sun," the thesis argues that the first-person narration, perceptual framework, and empathetic decision-making of Klara, an android programmed to be an "Artificial Friend," gestures toward a speculative form of posthuman subjectivity that nonetheless resists established posthumanist paradigms, such as those of N. Katherine Hayles. The novel's quasi-dystopian setting further emphasizes the "mechanisation" of human life juxtaposed with the anthropomorphisation of Klara. Turning to Mannequin Rising, the thesis examines how Miki's experimental poetry reconfigures subject-object relations within consumerist urban spaces. Through both visual and textual imaginaries, Miki's mannequins emerge as self-aware, reflexive figures that mirror the commodification of human bodies. At the same time, Miki's narrator is characterised as a poetflâneur, who uses acts of observation to destabilise the posthuman logics that structure the poems' cityspaces. Finally, the thesis brings both works into dialogue with one another, focusing on the shared image of the robot/mannequin behind the storefront window. In this configuration, how does narrative subjectivity for nonhuman figures promote a defamiliarising, speculative form of empathy in readers of these texts? And to what extent does it renegotiate the social and ontological boundaries between human and nonhuman?
Henry Yicheng Yong (Thu,) studied this question.