Earticle

This study aims to analyze the deboundarization in posthuman novels from Gilles Deleuze’s perspective. Deleuze draws the aspect of deboundarization through a continuously fluctuating act of desire which deviates with endless versatility and mutation. This study analyzes The MaddAddam Trilogy, in which Margaret Atwood points to the political, economic, cultural, and environmental destruction intertwined with scientific and technological ethics. Posthuman novels shed light on the diverse forms of life produced: the fundamental coexistence of human beings and posthumans created by boundless scientific imagination. This thesis elucidates The MaddAddam Trilogy from the Deleuzian viewpoint of deformation through the use of the concepts of difference, becoming, and abstract machine. Reading posthuman novels through the Deleuzian perspective traces the line of flight of non-humans that destroys the existing governing structure and hierarchy.

This study aims to discuss the deboundarization in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 from a perspective of deterritorialization conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze. The posthuman era can be said to be an era in which the boundaries between humans and machines are dismantled. This study illustrates the deterritorialization of AI in line with the Deleuzian conception of Body without Organs. Galatea 2.2 is a literary work that extends the concept of human beings to posthuman expectations that machines will be able to have a similar consciousness to humans. Helen, an artificial intelligence that breaks down the boundary between humans and machines, refuses to territorialize, which is a layout of power, and pushes for deboundarization to the threshold of extinction. In Galatea 2.2, the deboundarization revealed in the interrelationship between mechanized humans and humanized machines represented by Rick and Helen is assumed to be an involutionary and creative form of evolution. Analyzing the novel with Deleuze’s deboundarization results in requiring reflection on the human-centered oppressive ideology at the boundary between humans and non-humans.

This study examines Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South through the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze, focusing on the ethics of becoming and deboundarization. Drawing on Deleuze's concepts of becoming, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and the rhizome, the novel is read as a literary experiment that reconfigures modern subjectivity and ethical thought. Rather than reinforcing Victorian moral dualisms, the opposition between Helstone and Milton is interpreted as a dynamic process of ethical movement, in which stable moral frameworks are unsettled and reconstituted through affective and social transformation. Margaret Hale's displacement from Helstone to the industrial space of Milton exemplifies a process of deterritorialization that reshapes her identity and moral perception, while her evolving relationship with John Thornton illustrates becoming as an open-ended and relational process rather than a teleological moral resolution. The novel ultimately constructs a rhizomatic network of relations among individuals and communities, resisting hierarchical closure and embracing coexistence in difference. From a Deleuzian perspective, North and South articulates an open, affective ethic that conceives human life as a continual process of relationship-building, transformation, and the creation of new forms of life.