SOURCE: “Fin de Siècle and the Technological Sublime,” in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 302–15.

In the following essay, Wicke analyzes The Fly as a “fin de siecle narrative” that addresses technology, specifically genetic science, and its relationship to the body, or the human subject.

As a bridge to the longer analysis of David Cronenberg’s film The Fly (1986) that I will make in this essay on fin de siècle narrative and the technological sublime, I interpolate a short piece of text that meditates on the technologization of narrative’s body. A Mr. James Stephenson, writing in 1907 for Star Story magazine, and thus dated somewhat after the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, but not too late I hope to qualify as an exemplar of the technological sublimity I am tracing, makes these astonishing remarks in his article, “Electrical Desire”:

And is it not the...