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A New Materialist Reading of Steampunk Materialities in William Of Engines and Monsters: A New Materialist Reading of Steampunk Materialities in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station by Zafeiroula Kavvadia A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki NOVEMBER 2017 Of Engines and Monsters: A New Materialist Reading of Steampunk Materialities in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station by Zafeiroula Kavvadia Has Been Approved February 2018 APPROVED: Supervisor: Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou Examiners: Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi Dr. Michail Kokkonis TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………………..... i ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………… iii INTRODUCTION ……………………...…………………………………………………….…1 CHAPTER ONE: Ghosts and Machines: Material Objects, Technological Progress, and Human Primacy in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine 1. An Alternative Steam-Revolution ………………………………………….... 20 1.1. Back To The Future: The Difference Engine and Steampunk Ideologies…………………………………………………………......… 23 1.2. Matter With a Vengeance: A New Materialist Reading of Objects and Settings ………………………………….……..…………….…..…..…. 28 CHAPTER TWO: “Half-Things and Neither-Nors”: Embodied Materiality, Difference, and Subjectivity in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station 2. The Promises of Monstrous Flesh ………………………………………...…. 50 2.1. The Weird and the Weirder: China Miéville’s Tales of Darkness and Resistance ……………………………………………………..….…..… 52 2.2. “Dreamed up in bone and brick”: A New Materialist Reading of Embodied Matter ……………………………………………….…….… 56 CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………………….…. 81 WORKS CITED ………………………………………………………………………...….… 87 Kavvadia i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis took much, much longer to complete than anticipated. A lot happened in the course of the one year and a half between completing the required coursework and the submission of this work. In this torrent of change, it is one of the most rewarding moments one could hope for to see this project completed. It has been more than eight years since I was a first-year student at the School of English. Since then, I have learnt more things than I could have imagined, I have been challenged intellectually, and I have grown as a person (mostly for the better, I hope). This is why this place will always feel like more than home, and finishing is a pleasant and at the same time sad occasion. I want to thank all the teachers I have worked with throughout the years, and specifically those who worked with us during the master’s: Dr. Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Dr. Yannis Kanarakis, Dr. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi. Special thanks go to Dr. Anastasia Stefanidou for teaching us the value of mistakes in and out of the class. The most heartfelt and warmest acknowledgment has to be for Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou who, apart from being a wonderful teacher, was the most supportive and inspiring supervisor any student could hope for. This project would have never been completed without her patient guidance and uplifting comments pertaining to academic efforts, but not limited to them. Kleoniki Skoularika and Foteini Stavrou, our school’s librarians, also deserve a special shout-out and I am deeply grateful to them not only for being helpful sources of information, but also for being lenient with my mostly harmless yet habitual lack of punctuality in my shifts at the library. Kavvadia ii Of course, the program would be only half as awesome as it was without my classmates. Thank you Ada, Christina, Dimitris, Elli, Iliana, Ioanna, Katerina, Kristen, Maritina, Ria, and Stella for being actual friends. With all of you as companions, the journey was made not only easier, but fun and rewarding beyond expectation. Extra kudos for all those days and nights of fun, food, drinking, talking, and dreaming, and here’s to more of them. Finally, special thanks for their presence, as well as their emotional and material support, to all of my beloved, non-academic people, my family and friends, and especially Adrian, Aggeliki, Ano, Chara, Dimitris, Elissavet, George, my parents and grandmother, and most of all, my grandfather. This one is for him. Kavvadia iii ABSTRACT The present thesis examines two works widely cited as representative examples of steampunk fiction, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), with special attention paid to the theories of new materialism and how they can be applied to the two novels. Starting with The Difference Engine, a decidedly postmodernist work with metafictional elements, the first chapter highlights the ways in which material objects seem to guide social progress in the novel and alternately challenge as well as affirm human primacy, resulting in an ambivalent but ultimately pessimistic outcome for humanity. Continuing with Perdido Street Station, a gritty example of Weird Fiction, the second chapter focuses on the positive political potential that derives from the representations of hybrid embodied materialities when they interact with discourses of knowledge. The aim of this thesis is thus twofold: on the one hand, it attempts to show how malleable steampunk is, while on the other hand, it argues for new materialism as a promising critical and philosophical approach for the study of speculative fiction. Using a range of different sources, the present thesis attempts to explore how material bodies and material objects interact with one another as well as with the discourses of progress and knowledge as these appear in the primary sources under examination, and how the re-conceptualization of our relationship to matter can lead to a more sustainable social and political future. Keywords: new materialism, steampunk, matter, technology, neo-Victorianism, hybrid, anthropocentricism Kavvadia 1 INTRODUCTION “The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.” —Paul Valéry, “Our Destiny and Literature” (1937) The world of steampunk, which has become increasingly more popular, more diverse, and, for these reasons, more demanding of systematic critical attention, takes us back in time putting us alongside major geniuses whose inventions have changed the course of history as we know it. In the pages that follow, I will first attempt to provide an overview of steampunk as a cultural phenomenon, both in its literary and material manifestations, and then connect it to the political potential of steampunk speculative fiction that has been produced on the two sides of the Atlantic by focusing on the case of two specific writers. In particular, I will concentrate on two examples of literary texts identified with the steampunk aesthetic, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000). The focus of the analysis will be the representation of matter and materiality in relation to structures of power and technology, and especially the possibilities of resistance offered by the fictional encounters between technology and matter as evidenced in the novels under consideration, but also the ways in which problematic and/or negative ideas about matter and its position in modern human societies are reproduced. The steampunk aesthetic in these novels serves as the medium through which a reworked relationship of the human subject with materiality is examined, a relationship with the potential to upset given categories of subjectivity, difference, and change. For this reason, I want to suggest that the two works can be viewed as variations of steampunk fiction that co- exist but not necessarily overlap. In this formulation, steampunk is not unequivocally radical or conservative, but rather a malleable narrative framework within which contradictory political positions may be expressed. What I would like to propose in the current thesis is that the two texts to be examined here express important shifts in the popular technological imaginary in its relation to the material world, and that they are linked to the different cultural Kavvadia 2 environments their authors work from: Gibson and Sterling’s novel springs right from 1980s cyberpunk technofetishism and the dystopian impulse of postmodern science fiction, while Miéville’s work is influenced by the multicultural 1990s and the pressing need for a positive relationship to difference and change. The novels were published in the beginning and at the end of the 1990s in the U.S. and the U.K. respectively. The first was written by two eminent authors of science fiction literature in North America, Gibson and Sterling, while the second by one of the representative authors of the New Weird and the British science fiction Boom, Miéville.1 Thus, apart from the employment of the steampunk aesthetic, the two novels are wholly dissimilar: one could say that they ask the same questions, but do so in different ways and come up with different answers. The present choice is thus motivated by what I perceive as the points of contact between the two texts as well as by the individual trajectories they follow. If speculative fiction in general, and steampunk in particular, is a thought experiment in contingency, I am interested in exploring what exactly it is that makes a narrative produce certain
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