SavedAdd your journal

Journals / Overtones Ege Journal of English Studies / 2026 / Issue: 5

Posthuman Subjectivity and the Fragility of Being in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Tuncer Yılmaz(KARADENİZ TEKNİK ÜNİVERSİTESİ)0000-0001-6585-8284
Fatmanur Kalkan(ATATURK UNIVERSITY)0000-0002-8030-6610
Pages
—
Publication Date
2026-01-26
DOI
—
🏛️Bibliographic metadata and full text access for this article are provided via DergiPark.
DergiPark Record ↗
✨

AI Summary & Key Takeaways

AI Insight
⚡ TL;DR(Too Long; Didn't Read)

Taken together, this article offers a posthumanist perspective that deepens critical engagement with Ishiguro’s novel and contributes to broader discussions of embodiment, ethics, and technological coexistence.

📌 3 Key Takeaways

🎯
Objective & Hypothesis:Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun presents the fragility of being as a shared ethical condition across human and artificial life.
📊
Key Findings & Data:Drawing on Haraway’s cyborg metaphor, Braidotti’s posthuman subject, and Hayles’s theories of embodiment and technogenesis, the analysis shows how Klara’s sensory perception, relational identity, and emotional responsiveness challenge human-centred models of subjectivity.
💡
Conclusion & Impact:Taken together, this article offers a posthumanist perspective that deepens critical engagement with Ishiguro’s novel and contributes to broader discussions of embodiment, ethics, and technological coexistence.
🔬Design:Modeling & Simulation
📍Scope:Comprehensive Sample
⚙️Variables:Posthumanism · Artificial Intelligence · Embodiment

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun presents the fragility of being as a shared ethical condition across human and artificial life. Drawing on Haraway’s cyborg metaphor, Braidotti’s posthuman subject, and Hayles’s theories of embodiment and technogenesis, the analysis shows how Klara’s sensory perception, relational identity, and emotional responsiveness challenge human-centred models of subjectivity. Situated within a literary tradition of artificial figures, Ishiguro’s narrative departs from earlier examples by granting an artificial being narrative authority and ethical interiority. Klara’s involvement in Josie’s precarious mortality and Chrissie’s replacement fantasy interrogates the limits of transhumanist attempts to perpetuate identity beyond biological life. By foregrounding embodiment and distributed cognition, Ishiguro suggests that vulnerability, rather than autonomy or durability, grounds ethical relation. In rethinking posthuman subjectivity, Klara’s experiences ultimately reveal that fragility, care, and mutual recognition form the basis of ethical life in a technologically mediated world. Taken together, this article offers a posthumanist perspective that deepens critical engagement with Ishiguro’s novel and contributes to broader discussions of embodiment, ethics, and technological coexistence.

🔖

Cite This Article

Yılmaz, T., Kalkan, F. (2026). Posthuman Subjectivity and the Fragility of Being in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Overtones Ege Journal of English Studies, Issue: 5. https://ajindex.com/articles/1620343

📄 Full Text PDF Viewer

📄

PDF görüntüleyici hazırlanıyor...

References (30)

  1. Alonso, Luis E. Echarte. “Exploring Moral Perception and Mind Uploading in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun: Ethical-Aesthetic Perspectives on Identity Attribution in Artificial Intelligence.” Frontiers in Communication (2023): 1-14. DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2023.1272556.
  2. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
  3. Bauman, Zygmunt. “From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity.” in Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. 18-36.
  4. Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
  5. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
  6. . “Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13.4 (2019): 463–81.
  7. Chapai, Udaya Chandra. “Transcending the Boundaries of Human and AI Being: A Posthuman Study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel Klara and the Sun.” Pragnya Sarathi 22.1 (2024): 6-13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3162/ps.v22i1.64833.
  8. Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
  9. Echarte Alonso, Luis E. “Exploring Moral Perception and Mind Uploading in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun: Ethical-Aesthetic Perspectives on Identity Attribution in Artificial Intelligence.” Frontiers in Communication 8 (2023): 1272556. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1272556.
  10. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, [1982] 2003.
  11. . “Moral Injury and The Ethic of Care.” in Monographs of the Víctor Grífols i Lucas Foundation No. 30. Barcelona: Fundació Víctor Grífols i Lucas, 2013. 10-37.
  12. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149–81.
  13. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo’s Slippingglimpse: Distributed Cognition at/in Work:.” Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism. Ed. Francisco J. Ricardo. London: Continuum Books, 2009. 38–47.
  14. . How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
  15. . How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012.
  16. Heidegger, Martin. What Is Metaphysics? Trans. R. K. Gupta. Delhi: Philosophical Society of St. Stephen’s College, 1987.
  17. Hendlin, Yogi Hale. “Object-Oriented Ontology and the Other of We in Anthropocentric Posthumanism.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 58.2 (2023): 315–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12864.
  18. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.
  19. . Klara and the Sun. London: Faber & Faber, 2022.
  20. Kahambing, Jan Gresil S., Virgilio A Rivas. “Posthumanism in Ecofeminist Literature: Transgressions in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.” New Techno-Humanities 4.1 (2024): 33–40.
  21. Kristeva, Julia. Stranger to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
  22. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005.
  23. Lucas, Gavin. “Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Material Culture 7.1 (2002): 5–22.
  24. Mejia, Santiago, and Dominique Nikolaidis. “Through New Eyes: Artificial Intelligence, Technological Unemployment, and Transhumanism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.” Journal of Business Ethics 178 (2022): 303–6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05062-9.
  25. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
  26. Perry, Shannon A. B. “Embodying Affective Intra-Actions Online: Enacting Posthuman Methods in Virtual Spaces.” Qualitative Inquiry 29.10 (2023): 1012–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004231163164.
  27. Sahu, Om Prakash, Manali Karmakar. “Disposable Culture, Posthuman Affect, and Artificial Human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021).” AI & Society 39 (2024): 1349–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01600-1.
  28. Shakoor, Uzma, Iqra Akram, Ansah Yameen. “Posthumanism and the Question of Identity: A Critical Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.” International Premier Journal of Languages & Literature (IPJLL) 3.1 (2025): 116–34.
  29. Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1994.
  30. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.