Ruínas do Pós-Antropoceno: Corpos, Urbes e Crítica nas representações Cyberpunk

Abstract

The present research proposal aims to evaluate the way Literature and other arts conceive the post-Anthropocene. For this, the research proposes to investigate, within the limits and assumptions of Comparative Literature, the way in which the Cyberpunk genre has embraced the society of the 21st century, aiming, specifically, at the analysis of the construction of cities within the works, linked to the character configurations and the process of rejection of the Other. In this sense, the genre, both in filmic representations - such as Blade Runner (1982), Akira (1988) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) - and in literary representations, exemplified by Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), has represented that which postmodern capitalist society can negatively create. As a subgenre of science fiction, the motto "high tech, low life" exemplifies the demand of these works of art to represent the dichotomies and paradoxes of a society that aims for maximum technological concentration/acquisition at the expense of any hope or opportunity of life for those without capital. The very fictional construction of the city, thus, acts as a segregating model based on the maximum reduction of the individual to a disposable piece, while this subject, transmuted to the characters of the works in question, commonly suffers rejection and is misunderstood as an Other, or even practices this same prejudice, exemplified in the typical figure of Cyberpunk: the android. This, in turn, represents the maximum post-modern potentiality for studies about alterity, since it encapsulates, within its own concept and its own raison d'étre, that which defines the problem of mutual coexistence within contemporary societies: to respect and accept that which is not me. For the research to take shape, the studies of Jameson (1985), Debord (1997), Kristeva (1994), Amaral (2005), Lévinas (2005), Candido (2006), Baudrillard (2011), Han (2017), Young (2019) were used. Thus, the thesis aims to substantiate the understanding that the cyberpunk genre, unlike what was once suggested, has assumed functions of presentification of everyday life and no longer merely suggests dystopian futures, and is therefore a fundamental cultural element to research on otherness and multiculturalism.