The present master’s thesis investigates whether the thematic links between Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (1941) and Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (1998) indicate the presence of posthumanist elements in both narratives. Because Chiang’s novella contains more overt posthumanist elements than Borges’ pre-technological short story, the thesis also establishes a link between Borges and posthumanism through Arthur Schopenhauer’s idealism. The theoretical part first presents a general overview of the posthumanist paradigm, followed by a more detailed overview of N. Katherine Hayles’ posthumanism, whose principal tenets are the critiques of disembodiment and liberal humanism in cybernetics. The thesis then explores Borges’ metaphysics in relation to the idealisms of Schopenhauer and George Berkeley. The analytical section uses Hayles’ framework to examine the emergence of posthumanist subjectivities in the two literary works. The findings suggest that in both narratives, posthumanist subjectivity emerges when transcendence and unity take precedence over teleology and conscious agency. Finally, a broader selection of short speculative fiction works by the two authors are briefly analyzed and compared using the posthumanist lens.
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