Abstract
The chapter surveys narrative fiction published since the 1980s that incorporates discourses from pharmacology. While fiction has explored drugs and drug effects since the nineteenth century, recent works take seriously the science of human cognition in unprecedented ways. The pharmacological sciences offer particularly interesting fodder for contemporary fiction because the object of inquiry—the drug—is somewhere between science and technology, a medicinal substance and a product of manufacture. This opens up questions about the mind versus the brain, medical treatment versus optimization, the risk of addiction, and the question of what it means to be a natural human. In so doing, these works explore what is at stake in a risk society, particularly by honing the logic of the pharmakon.
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Roxburgh, N. (2019). The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction. In: Engelhardt, N., Hoydis, J. (eds) Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_2
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