Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy

'''Siivonen, Timo. "Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy."' SFS'' #69, 23.2 (July 1996): 227-244.

The organic and technological worlds of Gibson's cyberspace trilogy coalesce as discursive spaces for Gibson. Specifically, Gibson uses the oxymoron to produce meaning in his cyborg discourse. See Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. (Maly, 27/06/02)

Full text on JSTOR, abstract available free as of 27 May 2019.

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============= Also: Abstract. The essay discusses the relationship between body and machine in William Gibson's Cyberspace trilogy. The merging of the discourses deriving from the organic and technological worlds in Gibson's texts creates a discursive tension that can be characterised as oxymoronic undecidability. At the level of genre these tensions are articulated between the rational and technological genre of science fiction and the corporeal genre of horror. This cyborg discourse occurs, at the level of experience where man situates him/herself in relation to his/her body and technology, as the tension between two world views, essentialism and culturalism. The central argument of the essay is that Gibson's texts can't resolve these tensions his texts articulate but, by forming generic hybrids, they problematize the traditional Nature-Culture conflict and seek to find new signification practices to conceptualize the new social and cultural space in modernity.(p. 245)

Expanded by RDE, 27May19