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Giving Form to Life: Cloning and Narrative Expectations of the Human

Abstract:

The essay analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go in the context of both fictional representations of cloning and the contemporary debates on the ethics of cloning. In certain debates human cloning has been framed primarily in terms of its effects on the parent-child relation and the family. But an investigation of arguments both for and against cloning reveals how this scenario privileges a specific normative narrative of individuation that prescribes the proper form for life. The conventions of cloning narratives highlight the role of this normative narrative in our constructions of the human. From movies like The Island to science fiction classics like Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, these narratives betray anxieties over individuation. Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, reflects on the narrative modes that shape what it means to be human. It measures the human not in terms of some narrative of internal or immanent development but rather through the process of relating to another.

 

June 2008: Mark C. Jerng is Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Davis. He is finishing a book manuscript titled Claiming Others: Political Fictions of Transracial Adoption, which analyzes conditions of kinship, personhood, and citizenship across races and national spaces in stories of transracial adoption from the 1820s to the present. He has essays on Chang-rae Lee, William Faulkner, and Charles Chesnutt published or forthcoming in MELUS and Arizona Quarterly. The article in Partial Answers is from a second project -- on the interrelations among alternative modes of social reproduction, the reproduction of race, and human rights.

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/17/2020