Mutation of Dystopian Identity in the Age of Posthumanism: Literary Speculations

Abstract

Dystopia while deconstructing utopian ideas generates a special type of identity as a consequence of a deviation from anthropocentric principles, crises of national and cultural worldviews, and changes in manifestations of social shifting in the posthumanist world. The article has focused on four symptomatic dystopian texts – George Orwell’s Nineteen Forty-Eight, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ahmed K. Towfik’s Utopia, and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte – to explicate the dichotomous nature of the opposition of identity vs society in the posthumanist transformations. Those conditions are considered a cause of the mutation of dystopian identity that troubles its anthropological bases and modes of existence. To reconstruct the posthumanist context and its influence on the dystopian identities in the selected novels, this study has exploited a mixture of the following methods: intertextual, cultural, and genre ones; phenomenological approach; hermeneutic interpretation; conceptualisation, etc. The novelty of the study emanates from the very attempt to interpret the writers’ names of the AGEs which are represented in the books as a background of storytelling and a lens through which the posthumanist space is transformed from a dystopian perspective.