Posthumanism in Contemporary British Fiction: A Critical Examination of AI Narratives

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore how contemporary British fiction recontextualizes posthumanist thought when applied to issues of artificial intelligence through narrative speculations about the technology, using Ian McEwan's Machines Like You (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021). At the convergence of literary criticism, posthumanist theory, and AI ethics, the study questions how the works speak to human exceptionalism, re-theorise subjectivity, and mediate the question of the moral standing of intelligent machines. The analysis will draw on theoretical approaches and arguments expressed by Haraway, Braidotti, and Hayles, as well as philosophical statements on the debate on AI ethics, and apply them through a close reading approach that identifies theme-based convergences and divergences in the narrative structures of the authors. The historical fantasy of McEwan is based on a vision of an alternative past as a politically loaded context that questions agency, empathy, and the end of life. In contrast, Ishiguro's metaphorical sensitivity is a somber meditation on care and memory, a thoughtful victory of a humane consideration of sentient creatures. Their results indicate that the ontological borders between humans and machines are unstable in both texts, as evidenced by the hybrid identities introduced in both pieces that challenge the moral and lawful systems. Moreover, the research indicates that British AI fiction serves as a reconfiguration of the posthumanist discourse, highlighting the interconnection between speculative stories and the need to establish ethical relationships in the development of future technologies. Where the research makes a contribution to the study of cultural implications of AI as an interdisciplinary field of research, it demonstrates the synthesis of literary analysis and philosophical questioning that proposes a relational approach to the ethical implications of AI as a derivative of interdependence between human and nonhuman beings in the form of a technological lifeworld.