| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 96 === This thesis offers a critical study of paranoia and conspiracy in contemporary cyberpunk and cyberculture. Chapter 1 examines the postmodern phenomena in William Gibson''s Neuromancer, the Wachowski brothers'' The Matrix Trilogy and other cultural texts. Chapter 2 relates Baudrillard''s "holy trinity"─"simulations," "implosion," and "hyperreality"─with Žižek''s psychoanalytic theory of "interpassivity" to examine the passive condition of contemporary subjectivity. In Chapter 3, the discussion goes to a psychoanalytic reading on "the Edge of the Construct" films like The Truman Show, The Village, and The Matrix wherein the proliferation of paranoiac conspiracy theories demonstrates the ideological fantasy in the postmodern society of enjoyment. Based on the belief that cyberpunk and cyberculture exemplify the postmodern symptoms of endless "losses," nostalgia, spatio-temporal disorientation, information overload and hence the anxiety of "lack of lack" in a computer-saturated world, this thesis provides a symptomatic reading of these phenomena, from which we can achieve a closer understanding of the innermost fantasies of the postmodern subjects, hence the possibility to penetrate and "work through" the fantasies in cyberspace.
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