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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Deindustrialisation and the Selfish Gene
Gene and Strike
Overpopulation and Whiteness: Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor
Brackets and Choice: Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton
Chapter 2: Cultivating Dreamworlds
Mutual Aid
Cultivating Humans
The Fifth Problem: Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic
Genogeography: Kir Bulychev’s “Another’s Memory”
Chapter 3: Memoir and the Laboratory
Metaphors of the Human Genome Project
Welfare, Profit, and the Vitruvian Man
Ending Development: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Algorithmic Governmentality in Andrew Niccols’s Gattaca
Chapter 4: Speculative Ancestry
Ancestry Making
Genre, Genetics, and Genealogy
Henrietta Lacks and Stolen Flesh
Reparation, Romance, and Kinlessness
Leaving: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother
Staying: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
Chapter 5: Toxic Infrastructure
Chernobyl and the Postgenomic Condition
Adaptation, Improvisation, and Epigenetics
Mutation and Fragmentation: Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer
Transitional Characterisation: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy
Conclusion: Disappearance, community, characterisation, genre, and scale
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Lara Choksey is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, UK.
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2021 BSLS Book Prize
Genomic technologies have had a profound impact on understandings of what it means to be human and our links to the world we inhabit, and on practices of inhabiting the world. This open access book considers this impact across a range of literary forms, cultural practices, and political imaginaries, and argues that new descriptions of biological value introduced through practices of genomic sequencing from the late 1970s registered a broader crisis of narrative form. Examining a wide range of texts by Doris Lessing, Samuel Delany, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Kir Bulychev, Kazuo Ishiguro, Saidiya Hartman, Yaa Gyasi, Svetlana Alexievich, and Jeff VanderMeer, Narrative in the Age of the Genome casts new light on the intersections of genomics with politics of racism, sexuality, labour and gender, neoliberal economics and environmental crisis.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust
Foreword
Charts the impact of genetic science on literature, culture and our understanding of what it means to be human.
Additional text
Intellectually rich and rewarding, this study ranges effortlessly across the fields of biology, socio-economic theory and philosophy, drawing on these perspectives to forge novel readings of a range of literary texts. Imaginative and astute in its reflections on genre and narrative form, it is beautifully written throughout. The argument is bold and original, grounded in rigorous research and always attentive to the specific biosocial contexts it explores.
