Posthumanism and Ethics: Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun, the eighth novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, was published in March 2021.  Ishiguro is well-known for the combination of a subtle, understated style of narration, often delivered by unreliable and compromised narrators, with devastating revelations of ethical, political and emotional trauma. His new novel is no different: Klara and the Sun is set in a future near to ours, but which has made a few key advances in artificial intelligence and related biotechnologies; and the novel is narrated by an ‘artificial friend’, Klara.  Klara’s narrative reflects on the status of the human and its relationship to ecology, technology and ethics in a rapidly-changing world – and in the most intimate circumstances of lived experience.

In this episode, leading Ishiguro scholars Yugin Teo (University of Bournemouth) and Dominic Dean (University of Sussex) are joined by Amelia DeFalco (University of Leeds), a researcher of posthumanism and ageing, to explore the ethical and political questions raised by Ishiguro’s latest novel, and their relevance both for Ishiguro’s work as a whole and for critical issues of our contested future.