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영어

This thesis aims to explore the different ways in which posthuman subjects are constructed in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. The novel suggests two opposed posthuman characters, Microft Ward and Eric Sanderson. The former is a gentleman scientist in 19th century, who decides to be immortal and puts his scheme into practice, which was to breakup his personality into small components and copy it into other body. It reflects on Transhumanist view that consciousness can be separated from the body and instantiated in any substrate in the selfsame way. Ward implemented the standardizing process with internet and digital database to maintain homogeneity of his several bodies, and thus the urge of survival ends up transforming him into a machine. In the other hand, Eric is left a mere shell of his self by the attack of a conceptual shark, losing all of his memory and identity. He goes on a journey to recover his lost self, but in his pursuit, he realizes that his self is a flexible and changable being embodied and interconnected in the environment rather than a fixed and constant one. He cannot recover the original self, but becomes another version of Eric Sanderson, who still retains some parts of the first Eric but has been changed.