ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a contrastive analysis of two fictional narratives rather dissimilar in their styles: a short story by cyberpunk writers John Shirley and William Gibson and a novel by Dave Eggers. Its main aim is to focus on both narratives as reflections of the limits that a transhuman approach can find from our present condition. Wiener’s notions on a new understanding of the human being, McLuhan’s theories of self-amputation and social narcosis, and Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity form the combined critical framework from which the corpus is addressed. The analysis shows that both the cyberpunk tale and Eggers’ novel are examples of the dystopic and anti-mythic drive that the writers provide for the notion of the circle—an ancient symbol frequently associated with the continuity of life and the permanent durability of existence. Here, irony and pragmatism have displaced the positive and almost religious power previously conferred to the symbol. Finally, this work evaluates the motif of the chase to round off the analysis of the two fictional narratives and point out their allegedly different but complementary understanding of human development (or stagnation) at both sides of the turn of the millennium.
