Stone Gods Research Articles

“I hate science fiction”: Genres and Planets in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the critical promotion of science fiction in the Anthropocene. It highlights the genre’s technocentrism and ethnocentrism, and its historical alliance with empire and globalisation, but specifically argues for the genre’s association with an emerging planetarity whose hegemonic dynamics are underscored by Matthew A. Taylor (2016), among others. The paper revisits Margaret Atwood’s distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction, and calls attention to theorisations of planetarity that are not premised on scale or totality, to raise the question of genre and planetarity in and beyond science fiction proper. As a literary illustration of how genre my bear upon planetary thinking, the paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel The Stone Gods, which varies genres, scales, and planets. In the novel, a critique of imperial, world-making, planetarity is implemented as a parody of science fiction, whereas a change of genre opens for a different understating/practice of planetarity.

Of Information Superhighways, Sexbots, Friends: The Delights of the Uncanny

This article explores the uncanny potential of artificial intelligence in view of the trope of the Frankensteinian creature. I argue that since Masahiro Mori has coined the term ‘uncanny valley’ the link that has been created between AI and the uncanny has more to do with postcolonial notions of first contact than with the uncanny as such. Reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Spike Jonze’s Her and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, I investigate how these texts follow a new trajectory of AIs that are programmed to please rather than the well-trodden paths of dystopian or apocalyptic worst case scenarios. The AIs all raise important posthumanist issues that need addressing, but they do so in a very unthreatening manner. My final take on previous developments of a new medium shows that new mediums have mostly been denigrated as evil.

Climate Crises, Ruined Islands, and British Metamodernism

ABSTRACT This article contends that popular acceptance of Anthropogenic climate change in early 2000s Britain coincided with cultural efforts to redefine the historical present via transhistorical phenomena through the concretization of deep time. This article therefore situates itself in the historical juncture between the IPCC’s first report (1990) and its fourth (2007) to argue that the climatological, financial and geopolitical crises that coalesced in the 1990s prompted a shift that changed the tenor of British climate fictions published in the 2000s. To address the supranational reach of the climate crisis, British authors used metamodernist means to map the historical ruination of remote islands onto speculative futures extrapolated from the climate reports of the IPCC – thereby conjuring the climatological transformation of Earth into an Earth-like planet and the propulsion of humans toward future obsolescence. Ultimately, this article attends to the ecocritical significance of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) and Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) to suggest that these metamodernist climate fictions transpose the failures of submerged pasts onto near-futures drawn from present precarity to undermine the present as unique, the future as determined and the past as inaccessible and of little use to the present or future.

Posthuman and Personhood: Legal Ambiguity of Robo Spiens, Corporate and Nature in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Posthumanism is frequently associated with the concept that humans are no longer mere biological entities, but rather intricate and multifaceted beings endowed with distinctive characteristics and abilities. Conversely, legal personhood pertains to the status of individuals or organizations as legal entities possessing rights and responsibilities under the law. This encompasses their capacity to engage in contractual agreements, own property, initiate or be subject to lawsuits, and receive specific protections under legal frameworks. Both ideologies emphasize the significance of individual autonomy and agency while simultaneously challenging conventional notions of humanity. What’s more, the Stone Gods portrays nature, corporations, and robo sapiens as entities endowed with a certain "legal personhood" during the posthuman era, igniting fervent debates on whether we should bestow such status upon these non-human beings. This article delves into the legal ambiguity surrounding personhood for non-humans in this futuristic era, aiming to further explore the rational potential of dynamic legal personhood for the future.

What Do Sex Robots Want? Representation, Materiality, and Queer Use

ABSTRACT: This essay addresses its title question by analyzing sex robots, real and imagined, as both representational objects and vital matter. Though frequently treated as perverse by popular media, actual sex robots are in fact remarkably conventional in their reproduction of a heteronormative sexual aesthetic that disavows the vibrancy of the sexualized object. Sex robot art and fictional narratives (both film and literature), including Jordan Wolfson’s installation Female Figure (2014), Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), employ and interrogate this kind of mimetic design. In these texts, sex robots assert their vibrancy and agency via what Sarah Ahmed terms “queer use,” while at the same time reinscribing the humanist hierarchies that precluded their vitality in the first place.

Worlds Falling Apart: Human and Nonhuman in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Abstract This essay discusses Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) in light of human and nonhuman relationships. The author presents us with quite a paradoxical situation, whereby what is human seems to be less human than what is said to be nonhuman. The ontological instability produced by such a peculiar paradigm generates interesting consequences in terms of fundamental rights, especially when applied to hybrid forms of life such as those represented by “Robo sapiens.” Hence, Winterson’s novel invites a reconfiguration of the notion of rights and “legal personhood” in the context of AI systems. Robots demand that their “humanity” is acknowledged and, as a consequence to that, they also demand that they are granted rights. One could notice that Robot’s existential condition is very similar to that of slaves, precisely like slaves they are submitted to servitude, forced or bonded labour. And yet the fact that they are not “fully human”, only very similar or close to them, puts robots in a juridical position that might be compared to that of animals and the way they are presented in animal law studies.

Use of Time Reorder as a Literary Plot Device

The concept of time is deeply rooted within the field of literature; not only does it present itself in literary works in the form of theme or symbol. It can also be viewed in the reflection of the time in which the piece was written; but, most importantly in the context of this paper, it plays an essential and indispensable role as a plot device when constructing the narration. The modification of these expressions of time varies in accordance with the author’s views and purposes for their literary work. Thus, instances of toying with the base structure of time flow occur. This paper aims to display the employment of time reordering as a plot device in order to conclude whether this manner of writing was beneficial to the works in which it is depicted. This analysis will take into consideration a variety of advantages that time reordering could provide, from adding a sense of mystery, chaos, or irony, to much more intricate plot, structure or even subtext benefits. To be able to encounter all of the mentioned benefits, this paper will discuss a selected number of fictional literary works from the Gothic-like historical novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd to the contemporary novel The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson. The term of time reordering within this paper will refer to the abandonment of a linear plot line and the approach of multiple timelines or a hazardous presentation of events.

‘KENDİNİ TEKRAR EDEN BİR DÜNYA’: WINTERSON’UN TAŞ TANRILAR ADLI ROMANININ NIETZSCHECİ BİR OKUMASI

The cyclical nature of the human experience has been widely discussed through the cynical mind-set of the postmodern era. Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, stands out as one of the texts that revolve around this pessimistic discussion concerning the cyclical and repetitive nature of the human condition and history. Besides the implication of this never-ending cycle of the human experience as part of the action of the narrative, the repeating appearance of the certain parts of an old book throughout the narrative also resonates the fact that history as a narrative keeps repeating itself. In this respect, the circular or rather spiral nature of historical progress is highlighted through a fictional intertextuality. Winterson’s novel also epitomizes the Deleuzean control society and various forms of violence as the central concept around which the repeating pattern of human behaviour revolves. In this context, the article aims to discuss how control and violence as the central concepts of the novel are represented in a variety of ways, ranging from the anthropocentric violence that is directed towards nature, to systemic violence that the individuals are subjected to by institutional structures in the light of Nietzsche’s argument on the immanent violence of human nature and his concepts of will to power and the overman, which is exceptionally represented as the artificial intelligence.

‘Speculative Slipstreaming’: The Impact of Literary Interventions within Contemporary Science Fiction

Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson are two canonical writers participating in a ‘literary slipstream’ through their ventures into science fiction, creating crossover texts that confuse the boundaries between the literary and the popular. This interface is exemplified through the awards received by these writers, which help to bring literary credibility and integrity to the genre. Atwood’s first speculative novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula award and the Booker Prize, whilst her MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2015) was followed by the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society in 2015. Winterson was awarded an OBE for her services to literature in the same year that she published The Stone Gods (2006), whilst her most recent novel Frankisstein (2019) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. This article explores the extent to which distinctions between the popular and the literary are reliant upon notions of inferiority and superiority, and the problematics of a desire to frame genre fiction according to perceived notions of literary value.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Frankenstein Redux

Frankenstein Redux

Technological Practices of Embodiment Reflected in Jeanette Winterson’s Fictional Framing of Posthuman Subjects

Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects’ practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson’s rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration.

Conflicts of Traditional Norms in the Packaging of Ikom Monolith for Tourism in Cross River State

The Ikom Monoliths represent one of the masterpieces of Nigerian Arts and a perfect tourism Showcase for tourists. Unfortunately, some locals or Tour Guides have continuously or erroneously projected the monoliths according to their subjective mythological beliefs as warriors, deities, or gods of Stone with powers to cure ailments like barrenness, epilepsy, and madness. This subjective point of view is neither scientific nor marketable to critical global minds. Rather, the Monoliths should be promoted or marketed as efforts of early settlers with astronomical awareness and capability for iron works and Artistry as depictions of these stone works range from noteworthy effigies or representations of village beauties, cultural emissaries, gifted farmers, shrewd hunters, wise chiefs and prominent dignitaries and positional astronomy. Furthermore, the astronomical angle when verified can make it an exciting visit for adventure Tourists. As a Tour Guide, the content of the packaging can make or mar a Cultural Product depending on the information you set out to transmit or dish out to your Regular and Potential Tourists. This paper intends to highlight the beliefs or myths that have either rebuffed or attracted Tourists, or Researchers, and the curious public to the Ikom Monoliths.

JEANETTE WINTERSON'S THE STONE GODS: VOICING A POSTMODERNIST EMBODIMENT

Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) displays a new conceptualization of the body that tends to disfigure the unified perception of human subjectivity. In this fashion, Winterson renders a posthuman concept of the body that resists the notions of origin or end. Accordingly, The Stone Gods is a manifestation of posthuman bodies that transgress the boundaries and are in a ceaseless condition of becoming. In this sense, the posthuman body is not a stable and predetermined concept but rather it embodies continual change with an ability to produce alternative possibilities. Winterson’s perception of the posthuman body aligns well with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-revolutionary” through which they defy any kind of static conceptualization including human subjectivity. Within the Deleuzoguattarian perspective, becoming operates through making “assemblages” including human/machine, human/animal, and human/plant. The alliance that is formed by the process of making each assemblage produces multiplicities of bodies including the posthuman body. This type of body is neither human nor nonhuman, but it shapes a unique thisness, “haecceity” in Deleuzoguattarian terms, that is beyond gender and origin. Thus, the posthuman body acts as a threshold that allows the rhizomatic movement from one body to another one.

Antroposen’de zamansallık: Jeanette Winterson’un Taş Tanrıları’nı yeniden değerlendirmek

Over the past two decades, since the term Anthropocene was coined by Paul Crutzen in 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has attracted the attention of many contemporary authors. It is a phenomenon that is hard to totally grasp and only distinguishes itself through evidence such as climate change and other environmental disasters. The Anthropocene challenges the concept of temporality because as it is so enormous in range it resists representation within a specific time. In order to narrate the Anthropocene and its devastating impacts on human and nonhuman worlds through literary texts, the Anthropocene authors need to deploy new narrative techniques that make possible the image of such vast scale issues. In The Stone Gods, Winterson utilizes nonlinear structures of time to portray the story of a planetary catastrophe as a form of a continuum that influences different time periods from past to present and definitely the future. She skilfully reconstructs the concept of time to create alternative worlds that allow her to imagine ecological collapse in different times and locations. With its three interrelated sections, The Stone Gods narrates the story of the Anthropocene as a continuous thread of degradation which occur throughout history in parallel with the destructive activities of humanity on Earth.

Teaching Anti-Utopian/Dystopian Fiction in RFL/EFL Classroom as Intercultural Awareness Raising Tool

The article sets out to explore and substantiate the effectiveness of using anti-Utopian and dystopian fiction in teaching intercultural communication. It is based on the lasting experience of teaching Russian and English languages and cultures to students from many European, Asian, and African countries trained as Russian and English philologists at the Kyiv National Linguistic University. Intercultural literacy is one of the conditions sine qua non for successful communications and career in the rapidly globalizing world. Intercultural awareness in the Foreign Language Classroom can be raised by incorporating literary texts written in target languages into the curriculum. In addition to being instrumental for acquiring linguistic prowess, they can also play a substantial part in fostering (inter)cultural competences in non-native speakers. The two texts by contemporary Russian and British writers (Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx and Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods) were selected as case studies due to their artistry in addressing familiar and relevant human concerns, while containing specific cultural codes to be deciphered and understood by the international students. It was established that the success of the teaching/learning process relies on the interactive dialogic qualities inherent in the texts under study and enabling comparative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural approaches to them, thus contributing to the formation of full-fledged intercultural speakers. As demonstrated by the article, current dystopian fiction may serve as an efficient tool in enhancing intercultural competence in international students.

Ecocide and Empire in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

ABSTRACT This article argues that Jeanette Winterson enciphers The Stone Gods with allusions to Rapa Nui’s colonial history. Specifically, Winterson’s speculative sections re-enact a forty-year interval (1868–1914) in Rapa Nui’s colonial past that saw the island’s partition into a penal labour camp and leper colony, as well as the islanders’ defeated bid for indigenous sovereignty. In effect, Winterson double-maps Rapa Nui’s colonial entanglements with Scottish-Tahitian and Scottish-Chilean corpocracies onto a terraformed Mars and biodiverse Venus to concretise the transhistorical and supranational scope of the Anthropocene. In so doing, Winterson cites Rapa Nui’s example to caution readers against redirecting available resources towards a techno-escapist solution to advanced climate change. Ultimately, The Stone Gods displaces Rapa Nui’s historical ruination onto Martian terrain to generate an affective sense of contemporary ecological and climatological precarity as inextricable from, and co-extensive with, an ecocidal fiction of Empire that can be revised.

Rethinking the Boundary Between Human and Nonhuman: Jeanette Winterson’s <i>The stone gods</i> as a Transgression Experiment

As a world-famous writer, Jeanette Winterson, as well as her novels, have been well-known for her lesbian theme and love theme. Little attention has been paid to the theme of transgression. However, studies have shown that transgression experiment is also the key theme through all of the novels by Jeanette Winterson. In the Stone Gods, she still keeps this narrative style and gives an attempt to stir the people to re-evaluate the boundary between human and nonhuman, attracting much more attention to the issues of transgression experiment and the result after transgression. In this paper, based on the Jenks’ theory of transgression, we found out that there are two ways that (1) broadening the definition of body;(2) breaking the boundary between human and environment, which could be accepted to attempt to explore the issues of boundary between human and nonhuman to examine whether the boundary could be crossed in The Stone Gods. In these ways, it is found out that the real aim when Winterson regards the novel as a transgression experiment is to not merely break a rule, rebel against normative social and cultural constraints, but rather lead a dynamic trend in cultural production and diverse discourse, in order to stimulate readers to have dynamic thought about everything.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods as a Feminist Cyborg Story Cyborg Story

Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel The Stone Gods is an admonitory tale about human environmental irresponsibility: in a highly gendered narrative the novelist demonstrates how the patriarchal domination inherent in human civilization leads to the destruction of the planet. Drawing upon the theoretical framework provided by posthumanist studies, especially the feminist perspective of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, the article interprets Winterson’s novel as a critique of the masculinist domination of human culture. It shows The Stone Gods as one of Haraway’s “feminist cyborg stories”, demonstrating that a female robot might prove to be a model for new human subjectivity which could lead our civilization away from the path towards self-destruction.

(Post)human Temporalities: Science Fiction in the Anthropocene

AbstractAlthough many SF texts proceed from the speculative premise that our species will continue to develop technologically, and hence become increasingly posthuman, our species’ continuance into even the next century is by no means assured. Rather, the Anthropocene exerts a new temporal logic; it is an age defined by an intensification of geological timescales. It is therefore noteworthy that many contemporary SF texts are ecologically interventionist and figure apocalyptic future temporalities which curtail the posthuman predilection common to the genre. This article analyses a tetrad of literary texts, written at various points during the last three decades, which summatively reveal the mutations of the (post)human temporalities figured by cli-fi texts. These four texts are: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1992-1996); Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007); Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014); and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015).