Revising the Ontological Human: A Posthumanist Reading of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Science fictions often portray futuristic societies that we can recognize as an embellished depiction of the contemporary world order. In this article, I am interested in examining how the idea of traditional humanness is revised in the posthuman future portrayed by Jeanette Winterson in The Stone Gods . I would like to probe the notion of essential human and its relevance in the present by analysing The Stone Gods as a speculative text that is firmly grounded in the disturbing realities of the past and the frightening possibilities of the future.

Jeanette Winterson, in her novel The Stone Gods unsettles the literary traditions, discomforting the readers by engaging them in a postmodernist playful and burlesque narrative about human penchant for vanity and self-obliteration. The stone gods is a picturesque cautionary tale lamenting the cataclysmic urge of humans towards self-annihilation. It elasticizes the temporal and geographic scale, material conditions of life, and forms of social and economic organization in order to mutate familiar conditions into uncanny conditions. This Borgesian allegory juxtaposes three narratives separated by interplanetary and temporal ambiguities that satirizes human tendency to impose their hegemonic clutches over this and every world they have access to. The repetitiveness and intertextuality condensed into a looping narrative that offers