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Abstract
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about human clones raised for organs, is most often critiqued as science fiction or dystopian literature by the scholarly community. Yet focusing on the institutional implementation of cloning obscures a more critically fertile theme: sentiment. As demonstrated in this article, the novel has deeper affinities with sentimental and abolitionist literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with speculative fiction. This generic reevaluation makes way for a broader critical approach to the novel's notion of humanness in the post-genome age.
. . . the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation. . . . At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill.
-Emmanuel Levinas
[A]n historical analysis of posthumanity cannot be grounded solely in technological transformation. Rather, it must be more broadly described as part of a set of interconnected discourses and philosophical claims surrounding concepts of mind, body, nature and artifice. It must take into account the historiography of concepts that have emerged and the cultural, political and media instantiations through which moral claims about a shiftof humanisms can be asserted.
-Andy Miah, "Posthumanism: A Critical History"
I. Introduction
On one level, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go (NLMG), may be read as a cautionary tale regarding the abuse of science and technology on humans and their civil rights. As others have noted, however, it is a story in which science and technology are conspicuously absent.1 Though the novel is narrated by a human clone and the major characters are clones, no scientists or doctors appear; there is no theory or explanation of genetic replication and we see nothing of its mechanics and implementation. Indeed, the most technologically advanced item to appear in the novel is the automobile. As one might expect, the dearth of science in a novel about clones has led to some anxiety among critics about how the work should be classified.2 Gabriele Griffin comments: "Many critics puzzled over the novel's genre, registering an affinity to science fiction . . . but arguing that it was not quite that."3 Weighing in on the genre confusion surrounding the novel, Mark Jerng dismisses Louis Menard's "Quasi Science Fiction," settling instead for the cumbersome "science-fiction without...