Awatary i powłoki: (bez)cielesność w literaturze cyberpunkowej

Abstract

The article revolves around the question of the boundaries of corporeality in selected cyberpunk novels, with particular emphasis on the evolution of body representations in virtual spaces, which remains one of the main identification marks of the genre. Broadly speaking, the evolution in question proceeds from a peculiar negation of the body in early cyberpunk prose, to its aestheticization in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, to the question of mind-body relationship touched upon in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. In the novels under discussion, corporeality poses both a problem and an ontological challenge, as it is located in technologically-determined environments which force textual subjects, and hence the readers, to constantly revise the boundaries and the status of their own bodies in a world more and more often resembling cyberpunk settings.