Browsing by Author "Baczynska Kimberley, Dominika"

This Master’s thesis examines Jeff VanderMeer’s postapocalyptic New Weird novel Borne (2017) in terms of the creator-creation myth as made famous by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and uses French philosopher Bruno Latour’s essay “Love Your Monsters” (2013) as a starting point. Reading Frankenstein as a parable for modern political ecology, Latour argues that, like Frankenstein, who famously neglected his creation, humanity’s real crime is not the creation of technologies, but rather the failure to love and care for them as we would our own children. Borne depicts a poignant relationship between a human, Rachel, and an orphaned nonhuman, Borne, whom she adopts as her child. The study reads this relationship as a narrative in which a human attempts, as Latour insists we do, to love their monster, thereby making the novel a bold reconfiguration and subversion of the Frankenstein myth. The primary theoretical perspective of the study is critical posthumanism, and Cary Wolfe’s posthumanism in particular. Posthumanism’s objective to destabilise western humanism and decentralise the human aligns perfectly with VanderMeer’s work which is also known for challenging and transgressing boundaries. The study begins by outlining the key elements of the Frankenstein myth and then proceeds to apply the myth to Borne. Through an analysis of how Rachel and Borne both comply with and challenge the conventional creator and creation figures, the study asserts that the main aspects of the myth that Borne challenges are the antagonism between creator and creation, and the monstrous status of the nonhuman creation. While both novels are engaging and poignant studies on mentality, intelligence, emotion, the right to knowledge, and the relationship between humans and nonhumans, the study concludes that Borne extends this study to all life, regardless of form. Moreover, by reconfiguring the myth in this way, the novel poses profound philosophical questions about personhood, agency, nonhuman sentience, and human exceptionalism, thereby encouraging a posthuman widening of perspective and the development of a more inclusive empathy cultivation across species lines—if indeed we are to think of species lines at all.