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Vision, Technology and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature interrogates an array of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk science fiction novels and short stories from Mexico whose themes engage directly with visual technologies and the subjectivities they help produce - all published during and influenced by the country's neoliberal era. This book argues that television, computers, and smartphones and the literary narratives that treat them all correspond to separate-yet-overlapping scopic regimes within the country today. Amidst the shifts occurring in the country's field of vision during this period, the authors of these cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk narratives imagine how these devices contribute to producing specular subjects-or subjects who are constituted in large measure by their use and interaction with visual technologies. In doing so, they repeatedly recur to the posthuman figure of the cyborg in order to articulate these changes; Stephen C. Tobin therefore contends that the literary cyborg becomes a discursive site for working through the problematics of sight in Mexico during the globalized era. In all, these "specular fictions" represent an exceptional tendency within literary expression-especially within the cyberpunk genre-that grapples with themes and issues regarding the nature of vision being increasingly mediated by technology.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Entering the Screen.- Chapter 2: "'Where is my Eye?' Gendered Cyborgs, the Male Gaze, and Lack in La primera calle de la soledad [The First Street of Solitude] and 'Esferas de visión' ['Spheres of Vision'] by Gerardo Porcayo".- Chapter 3: Televisual Subjectivities: Mediatic Ultraviolence and Disappearing Bodies in "Ruido gris" ["Gray Noise"] and Punto cero [Point Zero] by Pepe Rojo.- Chapter 4: Fake Presidents and Fake News: Holograms and Virtual Lenses in Eve Gil's Virtus and Guillermo Lavín's "Él piensa que algo no encaja" ["He Thinks Something is Off"].- Chapter 5: Conclusion: Specular Fictions in the Age of Embodied Internet
About the author
Stephen C. Tobin is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches literature and film classes on Latin American science fiction, posthumanism, speculative ecocriticism, and organized the 2022 symposium
Surviving the Anthropocene: Speculative Fictions from Latin America's Past, Present, and Futures. This is his first monograph.
Report
Tobin organizes his monograph both thematically and chronologically. Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature is a sophisticated and valuable analysis suitable for graduate study and useful to scholars who are similarly focused upon these timely issues of technology, vision, subjectivity, and speculative literature. (Michael Pitts, Fafnir Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, Vol. 11 (1-2), 2024)
