Tag Archives: Winterson

States and Princes

Posted on by
1

The recurrence of the line from John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising,” “She is all states, and all Princes I,” enacts an interesting effect on the themes of the The Stone Gods. From talking about it in class on Thursday, it seems that most people understand it as an affirmation of the personal love that endures in the world of the novel (I’m not being very charitable here, feel free to comment/argue/correct me). I agree that Winterson uses this quote to address a kind of love at work in the poem, but I feel that it is a critique rather than an affirmation; Winterson, I feel, is critiquing the megalomaniacal self-love that is found in the futuristic culture of the novel. Continue reading →

Circuitry in Humans

Posted on by
1

Toward the end of class today, there was an interesting discussion about the point in the novel that I found to be the most intriguing. In Winterson’s novel Stone Gods, much like all of our other texts thus far in this class, the concept of what makes one “human” seems to be interwoven throughout. Specifically, there is one short excerpt of the novel, which was discussed in class, which focuses directly on this concept. Continue reading →

Robots > Humans?

Posted on by
1

An idea we have discussed in class is that sometimes androids (in this case Spike) can appear to be “more human” than most actual humans (including those who appear in the first part of The Stone Gods as genetically altered monsters), and in turn this can beg the question of what it means to be human. Throughout the novel, Billie insists that Spike’s system is limbic, not neural (and therefore cannot experience emotions), and usually Spike wisely retorts that the definition of humanity is constantly changing, and if this is so what really is human? Are “genetically fixed” people any more human than synthetically created ones? I interpreted these conversations as suggesting that (at least part of) the reason why humans are again and again so destructive is that we value our own form and way of life above that of other forms. Continue reading →