No abstract

This paper examines, through the lenses of agential realism, the uncanny sense of posthumanist relational subjectivity that Winterson's utopia evokes through the twofold romantic encounter between female scientist Billie Crusoe and humanized sherobot Spike. This same-sex cross-species futuristic love affair that develops across two different space-times succeeds in blurring the boundaries between humans and machines, thus prompting readers to overcome their anthropocentric worldview and to abandon the deep yet narrow concern for the moral and cognitive implications of the humans' fate at the end of the de-centring process brought about by the posthuman turn, urging them to consider, instead, more significant and wider issues such as accountability and responsibility. Thus, it can be viewed as a fictional narrative embodiment of Karen Barad's theoretical reconfiguration of materiality as discursive and of performativity as a dynamic process of constraining iterative intra-actions rather than of determining interactions.

No abstract

"Modification versus Complementation in the Structure of English Noun Phrases. Apart from its head, the core element around which all the other phrasal constituents cluster, the noun phrase may contain dependent elements effecting determination (which poses few taxonomical issues), modification or complementation (two functions notoriously difficult to demarcate). This article outlines the inconsistent ways in which reference grammars make the distinction between modification and complementation in the structure of English noun phrases, and offers a more unified approach aimed to solve the terminological quandary. Keywords: complementation, modification, premodifier, postmodifier, complement, the noun phrase "

Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects’ practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson’s rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration.