| Alasdair Gray,hailed as“the first major Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott”,energizes his work with his exuberant imagination based on ingenious fantasy and fabulation,which implies his critique of human alienation in the modern world.Since it was published,Lanark:A Life in Four Books,acclaimed as one of the landmarks of20th-century fiction,has captured substantially more critical attention than Alasdair Gray's subsequent novels.In the era of post-human when advanced biotechnology is gradually invading human life and changing the state of beings,the debate over the relationship between human and machine is becoming a focus of the international community.The story of Lanark takes place in the middle of the 20thcentury when people knew nothing about artificial intelligence,cyborgs and the term“post-human”,though in the cult of machine.Set in a post-human world ahead of its time,Lanark narrates the unfortunate pursuit,struggles and failure of protagonists who suffer from inner illness and bodily metamorphosis,raising concerns about how humans view themselves and their relations with machines.Rooted in Bruce Clarke's interpretation of posthuman bodily metamorphosis,this thesis aims to explore Gray's peculiar literary imagination of a post-human world gripped by metaphorical diseases,consumption of body and commodification of time.Through an analysis of bodily metamorphosis and people's attempts in love,sex and relationship,it takes consideration of the relationship between man and post-human?hybrids of human and machine?.Bodily metamorphosis is noteworthy in Lanark where human brains and bodies evolve in conjunction with nonhuman components?mainly machines?,featuring Lanark and Rima with dragonhide,a lift with the voice of Gloopy,the bird-like airplane and the robot police.People suffering from bodily metamorphosis and thus a loss of subjectivity cannot re-identify themselves,succeed in love,sex and relationship and cope with the challenge from machines.The catastrophic end of the whole fictional universe warns Glasgow and the whole world that an excessive reliance on machines and new technologies may lead the society to collapse. |
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