From Flesh to Code: The Post Human Subject in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and The Sun

Abstract

The world of literature has gone through numerous recorded periods since the era of ancient times. The intervention of AI and other similar machines is the last threat to the true meaning of authorship and the creations. It is this necessity that guides to a serious examination of how literature captures the evolving definitions of what it refers to be human in the Gen Z era, i.e. in an era perpetuated by biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and digital shifts. The 21 st century fiction written in fiction is mainly driven by tech-renaissance. It is argued that chatbots, fembots, and robots are shaking in all the spheres of human brain and its functioning. The combination of human emotion to the machine creates anthropomorphized writers with unbelievable creativity. In the post-humanist context, such authors may as well be regarded as the competitors of the substitution of human writers or even as a form of imitation. The paper looks into the continuation of literature onto the highway of transition of a concrete identity of human beings to a post-human identity through the different incarnations of AI, cyborgs, and clones, as exemplified in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, that is, and Klara and the Sun.