English Abstract
Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning British author of Japanese origin, has written novels that invite introspection and profoundly explore such themes as memory, identity, service, care, regret, and the human condition. These works are often set in wide range of contexts, such as historical, dystopian, or speculative. Ishiguro’s narratives blend subtle affective depth with sociohistorical and socioeconomic commentary, as seen in the four main novels this dissertation studies: The Remains of the Day, which examines post-war England’s class dynamics; Never Let Me Go, a dystopian tale of cloned humans imprisoned in a biopolitical camp; The Buried Giant, a fantastical allegory of memory, remembrance, and historical reckoning; and Klara and the Sun, a posthuman exploration of AI-driven care and surveillance. This dissertation examines the ways in which economic structures interplay with and inform the intricate operations pertaining to identity, affect, memory, and agency in Ishiguro’s fiction. As such, the primary concern is with regards to how Ishiguro’s narratives, particularly as represented in these four novels, critique economic systems of their time and all their respective manifestations: neoliberal, biopolitical, psychological, posthuman, etc. Benefiting from interdisciplinary ties (i.e., affect studies, posthuman studies, stylistics/narratology, cognitive poetics, etc.) coupled with a close examination of Ishiguro’s texts, this dissertation probes into the ways in which the main characters of these novels experience economization and commodification in different capacities within the systems they are trapped in, but it nevertheless is equally intent on exploring how such characters show subtle and meaningful resistance through introspection, memory-keeping, love, and reverence. Moreover, the findings show that Ishiguro’s narratives expose the dehumanizing ethos of capitalism – Stevens’ dignity seen symbolic capital, clones’ bodies reduced to biological assets, memory being commodified in “misty” economies, and Klara’s caregiving being informed by surveillance and energy economies. In the meantime, however, the ethical and humane potentials that are embedded in the ways these characters resist different forms of commodification are highlighted. Another aim accomplished in this dissertation is a meaningful and inspiring contribution to Ishiguro scholarship by offering a fresh reading of his oeuvre from the perspective of the NEC – welding literary and economic criticism together – that can resonate with contemporary debates (as of almost the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century) on thorny issues such as labor precarity, bioethics, historical revisionism, and AI-driven surveillance/care. Last but not least, this research (re)introduces Ishiguro not only as a literary writer but also as a literary humanist and ethicist, whose sharp percipience and prescience beckon us to rethink the notion of value and humanity beyond market-driven metrics and reimagine a more humane conception of what it means to live in this world.
