From Scientific Utopia to Grotesque Dystopia: Hubris and Hybrids in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Experimental Subject”
Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Experimental Subject,” published in 2018, is the story of the fictional realization of a most disconcerting scientific utopia: the creation of a human-chimp hybrid. Oates describes with a clinical coldness, tinged with irony, the details of this experiment, which, however gr...
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| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Glavni avtor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2025
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Experimental Subject,” published in 2018, is the story of the fictional realization of a most disconcerting scientific utopia: the creation of a human-chimp hybrid. Oates describes with a clinical coldness, tinged with irony, the details of this experiment, which, however grotesque, is no less plausible. The utopian project then quickly takes a dystopian turn. Yet, onto the dehumanizing language of science, a more humanistic discourse is progressively grafted that takes the story in an unexpected direction, and leads the reader to envision another form of utopia that is equally destabilizing. Oates pushes to the extreme the excesses present in the latent state within a utopian project whose verisimilitude represents the main danger. To do so, she readily transgresses ethical and moral limits, as well as generic and aesthetic ones. |
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