Responses to Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

Responses to Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021)

Résumé

On the very first page of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), the eponymous character remembers how, when she and her fellow robots were new, they used to worry they’d “grow weaker and weaker” for lack of sun. The notion of vulnerability is thereby placed at the core of the novel from the start and, throughout the book, affects not only human beings but also machines, nature and the form of the text itself. Klara and the Sun also places vulnerability within a context of interdependence which, as shown by theoreticians, is central to the ethics of care and such related values as solidarity, solicitude and interconnection. As Carol Gilligan, Marianne Hirsch, Joan Troto and Jean-Michel Ganteau (among others) have argued, vulnerability, an ontological condition of human and non-human existence, can be viewed as part of an ethics of relationship and therefore a dynamic force based on the possibility for an empathic opening to the other’s vulnerability which is a mirror of one’s own vulnerability. In Klara and the Sun, forms of vulnerability and forms of care vary depending on one’s position and social status, and the dystopic society depicted in the novel, which may be seen as an allegory of contemporary Western societies, seems to produce vulnerability rather than try and alleviate it. This paper will analyze such a production of vulnerability by exploring the multiple forms of vulnerability in the novel (physical, relational, social, economic, emotional, textual…), focusing on the ethical, social and political scope of the notion. This will imply examining the ways in which the concept of vulnerability may be extended to robots.

Domaines

Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-04420304 , version 1 (26-01-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04420304 , version 1

Citer

Vanessa Guignery. Responses to Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Pier Paolo Piciucco. Contemporary Vulnerabilities, Nuova Trauben, pp.253-66, 2023, 9788899312909. ⟨hal-04420304⟩
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