ABSTRACT:SYSTEMS AND THE SUBLIME: SCIENCE FICTION, TECHNOLOGY, AND SUBJECTIVITY by James Jackson This dissertation examines representations of the sublime in late 20th century science fiction, a period of particularly fertile exploration of humanity’s relationship with both external environments and interior, psychic landscapes. The science fiction examined here, produced during the New Wave and cyberpunk movements, brought to bear an increased scrutiny of the social, psychological, political, and ecological tensions emerging in Late Capitalist culture. This dissertation posits that the sublime arises at the intersection of t systems of nature, technology, and human subjectivities. I argue that the sublime, a theory with a long Western philosophical history which focuses on the excessiveness that transcends human limits of knowledge and experience, becomes a pertinent concept for thinking through human and posthuman subjectivity and agency. While the sublime is often fraught with a Euro-masculine chauvinist ethos, this dissertation attempts to recuperate an understanding of the sublime that privileges emergent properties and subjectivities that do not resolve so simply into the hierarchical power structures associated with capitalist and imperialist projects but instead fan out into new potentials for being-in and making-with our environments. I draw from two disparate theoretical frameworks-- the sublime and systems theory--to cast new light on conventional notions of transcendence. The sublime, I argue, remains a pertinent literary trope exactly because it celebrates human autonomy in conjunction with nature. However, this dissertation acknowledges that the category of nature would seem diminished in light of technological proliferation. In fact, as elaborated in this study, humanity’s relation to nature has always been technological. I forward systems-thinking, then, as an apt methodological framework for literary analysis, particularly for reading contemporary science fiction, precisely because it draws critical attention to the interplay of systems which obscure human agency and social relations. My research articulates the social systems thinking of Niklas Luhmann with second-order cybernetics and the philosophy of technology to reveal how science fiction can, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, “present the unpresentable.”