Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature (Dec 2024)
Anti-heroic figures, Dream Boxes, and the Search for the Nature of Humanity: A Cyborg Narrative in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction
Abstract
KEYNOTE Yuqin Jiang is Professor of Comparative Literature, at the School of Humanities, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen. Her research interests span cyborg narrative, sci-fi poetics, digital humanities, science fiction, postcolonial literature, and cultural theories. She is currently leading a National Social Science Fund project titled "Cyborg Narrative and the Construction of 21st-Century Science Fiction Poetics". She has recently edited significant works: The New Integration of Science and Technology with Humanities: Research on Science Fiction in the Perspective of New Liberal Arts (Nanjing University Press, 2024) and Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction Writes (Nanjing University Press, 2023).Additionally, she has published over 50 essays in both domestic and international journals, exploring topics such as cyborg theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, science fiction studies, cultural criticism, and English literature, establishing herself as a leading voice in the field of science fiction and comparative literature. ABSTRACT Contemporary Chinese cyborg narratives highlight the characteristics of Chinese science fiction. This is manifested in three specific ways: first, the high-tech anti-hero narrative, which expresses the concerns of Chinese science fiction writers about the conflict between humans and machines and their worries about the future society of artificial intelligence; second, the exploration of the cyborg image in ancient Chinese thinking and concepts, using dreams to connect the relationship between humans and machines and to ponder the nature of humanity; and third, to use the cyborg as a cultural practice and social adjustment for human alienation, and to place it in the context of Chinese history and culture to rethink the relationship between past and present, tradition and modernity, and human and non-human, and to attempt to achieve a new balance in the relationship between humans and machines and a stable future.
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