Abstract:
Myths and legends have been extensively studied in orature even
though they have been given a facile analysis. This qualitative desk top
research presents an in-depth examination of Lwanda Magere folklore
by bringing to perspective its images, signs and symbols and exposing
their literary functions while theorizing the human body as a text. The
study used the human body as text theory to analyse data. Berger (1987)
notes that, ‘Looking fixedly at certain phrases sitting on the page, they
begin to move, change shape, dance, wriggle, turn inside out, sprout
wings and fly about flapping from one speech or speaker to another until
my wits begin to turn.’ Berger’s finding in literary words applies
intrinsically to human bodies and objects as texts. The paper has
examined human bodies in gender, military and economic senses and
data from the Lwanda Magere narrative as well as narratives from
foreign folklore have been subjected to textual analysis and their
discussions extended to touch on human bodies as prostheses, cyborgs
and weapons in futuristic science fiction. The study found out that life
dramatically changes when we continue to integrate scientific and
technological elements into the human body. The result will affect
ethics, morality, justice, economics and to a large extent what it means
to be human in the future.
Keywords: aesthetics, cyborgs, espionage, myth, prothesis, thenatos
