Exploring 'Otherness' Through Perlocutionary Speech Acts: A Posthumanist Case Study of Brave New World and Never Let Me Go

Looking back on the afterlives of the doppelgänger motif in 20th/ 21st century novels, the present paper assesses language in the context of dystopian, posthumanist diegetic worlds. Scholarship on posthumanist literature asserts that the post/ transhumanist ideal of a superior human being is achieved within fiction through technological and scientific progress. However, the analysis at hand proposes that language, especially perlocutionary speech acts (Austen 1926; i.e., utterances that produce an effect), underpin this posthumanist goal in literary works. Consequently, a case study is conducted on two novels, Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) and Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005), both of which tackle themes of cloning, placed in posthumanist contexts. They are a case in point of literary appropriation: in the two literary works, perlocutionary speech acts not only prove to carry out the posthumanist goal of enhancing human beings but also enact social exclusion in the diegetic worlds. Most significantly, operating with ‘the Other’ theory, a closer look is taken at complex literary portrayals of identity, where both humans and clones can be ‘the Other.’