The article reads a number of recent zombie narratives that include conscious/sentient zombies as narrators or focalizers in the light of posthumanist theory (most prominently Rosi Braidotti’s work). The main argument revolves around the meta-narrative construction of these texts, based on posthuman consciousness, suggesting that they allow readers/viewers to engage with questions of the human and its Others beyond the possibilities of traditional, non-conscious zombie texts.

This article discusses how the recent film adaptation of Macbeth directed by Joel Coen (2021) uses nature imagery – most prominently birds – to visualise ambiguities of literal and metaphorical meaning already inherent in the language of Shakespeare’s play, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s filmic adaptation Throne of Blood (1958). My arguments focus on the visual strategies used in Coen’s film to stylise the language of Shakespeare’s text for today’s cinematic audiences by drawing attention to the ways in which elements of nature are connected to specific characters, serving as harbingers of their emotional states and developments.

No abstract.

No abstract

Inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, cybergothic texts from the late 20th and early 21st century have explored fears of posthuman becomings. While monstrous machineries and techno-hybridizations are, of course, central tropes of the Science Fiction genre, it is within a framework of Gothic textuality that these fears can be explored in a more self-conscious and theoretical manner. This chapter presents a reading of James Tiptree's 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In' (1974) in light of one of the most central questions of cyber-theory - that of control. Harking back to Frankenstein's struggle over narrative, scientific, gendered and otherwise embodied aspects of control, Tiptree's seminal novella proves to be an exemplary text within an emerging self- and theory-conscious, cybergothic mode, addressing questions of genre, gender, techno-embodiment, narrative construction, and the need for (cybernetic) control over our technological monsters in a manner that connects the Gothic with a number of cyber-theoretical concerns.