| Along with the rapid development and pervasive distribution of simulatory technologies and media such as television and the Internet has come the Baudrillardian era of images, simulacra, and virtual reality. Possible negative impacts of such technologies and media on our perception and conception of the natural, both nature and human nature, are explored in this dissertation from an ecocritical perspective. Nature, both physically and mentally, disappears in highly urbanized and virtual-reality-oriented culture. Human nature is similarly at stake as the corporeal function of the body is under constant erasure by emerging posthumanist projects, such as human cloning, robotics, and cybernetics.;The above concerns about the loss of the natural are examined through the cultural analyses of selected works of Thomas Pynchon, Jerzy Kosinski, and William Gibson. Pynchon's novels map out a general cultural background of Baudrillardian postmodern and posthuman society by depicting the infinite play of the signifier, a-natural environment, and virtual death. Kosinski's Being There (1970), which satirically debunks the strong impact of television on human psychology, problematizes the role of mass media in postmodern and posthuman society. Furthermore, an ultimately developed, futuristic form of virtualized nature and human nature characterized by complete hyperreality is shown in Gibson's cyberpunk science fiction.;Despite the fact that the aforementioned writers are usually not classified as ecological writers, the common attribute of their texts under consideration lies in their diegetic examination of the postmodern and posthuman world where nature and human nature are at stake under technocratic culture. This dissertation is not intended simply to boost technophobia but to help deter the on-going gradual loss of the natural by manifesting the ecocritical need to be aware of the danger of virtualized and dehumanized society. |
