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Title The Loss of the ‘Real’ in Nikesh Shukla’s Meatspace: A Study of Constructed Hallucinations

Author(s) SHAGUFTA IQBAL

Abstract This research has attempted to highlight the issue of reality and its representation in postmodern literature as well as culture. The contemporary advancement in technology and hyperreal culture of postmodern age has made ‘reality’ an intricate phenomenon, that is not fixed; rather, it has become fluid and arbitrary. Literature, as it has been defined since ages as mirror to life, gives expression to human experiences through the delineation of life. Literature in the postmodernist sense has become a credible source of the delineation of the construction and subversion of socio-cultural erections that has demolished the Metanarratives by bringing mininarratives into centre. Reality in postmodern age is represented through its simulated representations by media and cyberspace. Baudrillard and Gibson are of the view that postmodernism has dismantled the fact/fiction distinction by deconstruction and reconstruction of ‘reality’ through its multiple simulated layers. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Hyperreality and William Gibson’s theoretical concept of Cyberspace has made postmodernism an object which can be witnessed in the form of Information Technology, technological commodities, images from pop culture, media, and advertisement. Both theoretical perspectives have defined ‘reality’ as techno-oriented phenomenon that is perceived through its simulated representations by media and cyberspace. The human/cyber interface involved in the phenomenon of cyberspace blends physical world and virtual world and subsequently blurs distinction between the two which is the same aspect of postmodern culture that Baudrillard terms as ‘hyperreality’. In our postmodern era, this simulated ‘reality’ has become a recurring feature of human life. The postmodern genre Cyberpunk represents the present-day technology-oriented societies and spotlights the issues of reality and its representation in virtual realms of cyberspace. In the light of these theoretical concepts, this research stands on textual analysis of the selected postmodern novel of Nikesh Shukla, Meatspace (2014). The textual analysis has projected that the world of technological innovations has produced novelty as well as complexity in everyday life of postmodern individuals. It has also sped up the subversion of metanarratives into mininarratives. In postmodernist context, there are no more absolute, static, and unique concepts of ‘reality’ . ‘Reality’ is simulated through abstract representations in postmodern hyperreal culture which has mashed-up human/machine, physical/cyber, natural/artificial, real/virtual and made them the blur dichotomies. This research highlights that in our digital age, these opposite factors are intertwined else in a way that the individuals find it difficult to differentiate between fact and fiction, real and virtual, reality and hallucination. So, the primary lens that has been used in this study is hyperreality. Encompassing postmodern pop culture present in the novel, the research makes a study of hallucinations constructed by postmodern characters of the novel in digital realms of cyberspace.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2020-05-07

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