This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

In her fifth dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood portrays North America in the not so far future, in the wake of a global economic crisis. Parts of the country are in the state of complete chaos, subjected to a ruthless gang rule. The solution to the system's breakdown comes in the form of the socio-economic experiment that requires from its participants relinquishing their freedom as every other month they will spend in prison. The seemingly preposterous (...) experimental project enables Atwood to explore principal questions about the limits of our freedom in the times of an economic crisis or a neoliberal model of economy. The satirical form the novel takes, especially towards its end, helps the writer to decry people's over-willingness to give away their freedom and civil liberties in exchange for happy, uninterrupted consumption. The following article aims to demonstrate that the notion of freedom and free will permeate The Heart Goes Last, which is, in that respect, a politically and socially engaged satire. (shrink)

Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki are two of the most prominent Canadian public ‎intellectuals ‎involved in the global warming debate. They both argue that anthropogenic global ‎warming is ‎occurring, warn against its grave consequences, and urge governments and the ‎public to take ‎immediate, decisive, extensive, and profound measures to prevent it. They differ, ‎however, in the ‎reasons and evidence they provide in support of their position. While Suzuki ‎stresses the scientific ‎evidence in favour of the global warming theory (...) and the scientific ‎consensus around it, Atwood is ‎suspicious of the objectivity of science, and draws on an ‎idiosyncratic neo-Malthusian theory of ‎human development. Their implicit views ‎about the cognitive authority of science may be ‎identified with Critical Contextual Empiricism ‎and Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, respectively, ‎both of which face difficulties with ‎providing solid grounds for the position they advocate.‎ ‎. (shrink)

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has predominantly been read as a critique of patriarchy, a feminist dystopia. This article amends the feminist analysis by applying a biocultural approach to the novel, taking as its point of departure three problems that have troubled the feminist reading: Offred’s perceived passivity, the novel’s subtly critical stance towards its feminist characters, and the open ending. By taking into account the environmental context-a fertility crisis-the biocultural reading is able to analyze char­acter in terms (...) of survival and reproductive strategies. Recognizing that the characters are negotiating male and female mating strategies under extreme conditions leads to a deeper comprehension of the way the contrasting philosophies of radical feminism and sociobi­ology inform sexual politics in the Republic of Gilead. (shrink)

Margaret Atwood’s novels are usually celebrated for their blunt feminism. However, in Moral Disorder—a series of interconnected stories that forms a novel—feminist concerns are replaced with worries about territory and survival. The protagonist is an insider whose sole concern is to survive and to protect her territory. The confrontation between the narrator as the insider and the outsiders does not occur directly but could be inferred by her cruelty toward other characters and her violence against the animals under (...) her care. The present study argues that this cruelty, which abounds in the novel, could be viewed as a substitute for violence against the outsiders. The narrator’s gaze at the Indian boy who entered the protagonist’s territory manifests a garrison mentality. The frequent references to axes in the novel are compared to the use of axes in “Wilderness Tips,” a short story by Atwood in which axes also have a metaphoric significance. The beheading and dismemberment of domestic animals could be the punishment awaiting the intruder. The novel establishes a division between the insider/outsider, here/there, self/other and civilized/barbaric to call for action and awareness about the importance of protecting one’s territory. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the eco-religious “God’s Gardeners” group as they appear in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood as a possible model of capitalist “non-existence,” exploring the alternative potentials at which they arrive in relation to waste throughout the text. The Gardeners present an affective mode of consumer non-participation as a possible first step toward a reflexive awareness of the role trash plays in our subjective experiences of the world. Through a process of (...) symbolic embodiment, the Gardeners exist in marginalized space and so re-situate waste for themselves as objects and spaces with new potential boundaries. This leads to a confrontation with social reality itself, piercing the reality-building project of capitalist logic in order to uncover the fabricated “antagonism between the Excluded—the ‘animals’ according to global capital—and the Included—the ‘political animals’ proper, those participating in capitalism” that structures characters’ experiences. The focus here is not only on re-situating waste but re-inscribing it in the domain of social discourse in a way that subverts consumer expectations and challenges the limits of desire. In these texts, enjoyment is displaced onto waste objects as a point of psychological investment transmitted from subject to subject. In building reality through these kinds of direct relations, Atwood implies, one may challenge the imposition of ideology and expand its apparent limits in order to re-symbolize the spaces and objects marginalized as waste, proceeding in the end to a renewed interconnection between subject, object, and excess. (shrink)

With the advent of the 21st century, the way characters and identities interact under the influence of dominant powers has brought a new world into existence, a world dubbed by Manuel Castells as the ‘Fourth World’. Within the Castellsian theoretical matrix of the Fourth World and politics of identity, the present study seeks to investigate the true nature of the futuristic world Margaret Atwood has created in the MaddAddam trilogy. The trilogy literarily reflects a global crisis that ultimately (...) leads to dystopia and the destruction of the human race: what remains of humanity is a small group of survivors who must struggle to conserve what remains of humanity. Identity as the main determining factor in the Fourth World represents personal and public privileges, characteristics, and means of differentiating oneself from others. The Fourth World and its political peculiarities reflect contemporary powers, i.e. the power of the network society, network communication and media. Humankind, in this wheel, is just a toy in the hands of an intelligence broker. What exactly happens to human and semi-human characters in Atwood’s trilogy is the result of Fourth World structures and values, and how they shape and reconstruct identities to lead the world toward fabricated truths and values, and terminate in dystopia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article seeks to draw parallels between today’s transmodern reality and the events recounted in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and in The Handmaid’s Tale Hulu TV series, particularly Seasons 2 and 3. Addressing issues such as controlled reproduction, violence, corporeal subjection of women, and environmental injustice, I focus on the body as a site of social construction, vulnerability and control. Drawing on the work of various scholars, I argue that the body is simultaneously a site of vulnerability (...) and of resistance that exceeds totalitarian categories, thus allowing for empowering “modes of heterogeneity,” fluidity, diversity, environmental as well as transcorporeal. In Gilead, the totalitarian state where Atwood’s two novels are set, it is the body that is acted upon, with massive repression and violence, and it is the body that resists by forming alternative relations and practices, which eventually facilitate the fall of Gilead from within. Throughout my analysis, I draw on the transmodern concept, while widening it toward the corporeal enmeshment with others in order to demonstrate that it is the interdependence of vulnerability and empowerment that reveals transmodernity’s “new visions of justice.”. (shrink)

Old age and visions of the future are inherently bound with one another, and the realms of dystopian fiction provide scope for a gerontological focus within contemporary literature. A theme that is now being revisited in speculative fiction, this paper aims to assess the role of the elderly within Margaret Atwood's dystopian tales, specifically looking at the role of gerontology in her collection of short stories Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales (2014). I argue that Atwood utilises the (...) dystopian narrative in order to address broader social issues that stem from immobility and declining virility. Focussing on Atwood's feminist politics and representations of the elderly woman in the dystopian narrative, this paper proposes that older women in Atwood's fiction seek to move beyond the asexual, immobile and matronly gerontological stereotype that is often portrayed in literature. Instead, the elderly, and in particular elder women, adapt to their environment, often becoming figures of their community. They are aware of sexual desires and look to move within and beyond societal constraints, utilising the realms of cyberspace in order to forge their own identity. The role of the elderly in a distinctly dystopian narrative allows for a new Utopian strategy to be constructed. (shrink)

Dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives are often vectors for utopian hope in decidedly anti-utopian historical moments. The twenty-first century has, arguably, been such a moment. The association of utopianism with some of the most devastating political projects of the twentieth century, the plurality of existential threats looming over the globalized world, and the hegemony of global capitalism converge to form a cultural milieu inundated with grim visions of the future. These visions, however, have a stubborn tendency to gesture toward their negation: (...) the emancipated society. Optimism and pessimism are intermingled in contemporary narratives that frame the end of civilization as the precondition for a utopian... (shrink)

This article analyzes the changes in The Handmaid’s Tale’s moral and political outlook as it tracks different forms of complexity in the novel, the film, and the TV series. While the sense of female empowerment increases with each adaptation of this tale of forced sexual servitude in fictional theocratic state of Gilead, the essay argues that Hulu’s TV series develops an intriguing interaction between the interiority of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel and the exteriority emphasized in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 (...) film. In so doing, the TV series Escher-twists across related binaries between activity/passivity and personal/political actions as well. By expanding, displacing, and creatively intersecting storylines which the novel cut short, the series weaves an intricate perspectival web that invites the viewer to participate in its mind games. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the development of a new trend in gastronomic discourse toward acknowledging and even valorizing the role of animal slaughter in meat production. This development problematizes some of the ideas of influential theorists of meat such as Fiddes and Adams : namely, that the animal in modernity has been rendered invisible in the process of meat production and consumption , and that meat itself is a commodity with a declining reputation . This paper analyzes the role of (...) nostalgia in this trend toward do-it-yourself slaughter, and takes these developments in cultural tastes and feelings as a context within which to analyze the special significance of meat in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. In identifying this burgeoning nostalgia for meat and contextualizing it within a risk-reflexive, consumer-driven, dystopian near-future society of the author's own devising, Oryx and Crake foregrounds and illuminates these real-world developments in the meanings of meat. (shrink)

Since 1959, when C.P. Snow delivered his seminal lecture The Two Cultures on the lack of understanding between scholars working in the humanities and their colleagues from science departments, the gap between the two groups has been one of the most notorious clichés of contemporary Western culture. The aim of this article is to show that this seemingly insurmountable abyss between sciences and the humanities that was brought to the forefront during the mid-20th century is slowly receding into history. Literature (...) studies today is heavily indebted to modern science. Biology, physics, and ecology are among the most important subjects scholars of literature have to take into account. In order to prove this point I shortly describe literary genres which introduce modern science to the readers: science fiction, cyberpunk, solarpunk, lablit, quantum fiction, and cli-fi. I also refer to the newly-emerged schools of criticism-science fiction studies, ecocriticism and evocriticism-to show how scholars discuss these texts within the framework of the humanities. Additionally, I give a sample discussion of one of the cli-fi’s classics, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and also shortly discuss two science fiction novels concerned with the civilisational conflict between science and humanities: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. (shrink)

In hyper-modern society, food has become a source of endemic discontent. Many food products are seen as ‘tainted’; literally, figuratively or both. A psychoanalytic approach, I will argue, may help us to come to terms with our alimentary predicaments. What I envision is a ‘depth ethics’ focusing on some of the latent tensions, conflicts and ambiguities at work in the current food debate. First, I will outline some promising leads provided by two prominent psychoanalytic authors, namely Sigmund Freud and Jacques (...) Lacan. Subsequently, I will elucidate why our chronic dependency on high-tech food production apparently fails to meet consumer needs, focusing on some scenarios of escape, such as anorexia, cultured meat and ersatz food. And I will use ‘genres of the imagination’ to flesh out how food consumption has become a podium for enacting cultural symptoms, moral outcries, provocative identities and practices of the Self. Notably, I will discuss a story by Franz Kafka, a painting by Pablo Picasso and a food novel by Margaret Atwood. (shrink)

This paper examines human-nonhuman splices from a multidisciplinary approach, involving bioengineering and literary studies. Splices are hybrid beings, created through gene-splicing—a process which combines the DNA of the two species, resulting in a hybrid or chimeric being. A current trend in biotechnological research is the use of spliced pigs for xenotransplantation. Hiromitsu Nakauchi’s pancreas study that splices pigs with human iPS [induced pluripotent stem] cells in order to grow human organs inside pigs is being compared to a highly similar case (...) of porcine hybrids: the pigoon from Margaret Atwood’s fictional MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood’s pigoons are pigs, genetically modified with human stem cells to facilitate the growth of various human organs for use in organ transplants with no risk of rejection. The case studies from science and science fiction overlap significantly and thus allow for a critical reading of the two highly different sources with a focus on ethical and moral questions regarding the use and abuse of nonhuman animals for human purposes. Furthermore, the context of the fictional works adds new layers of knowledge and new perspectives to the problematic issue of animal “enhancement.” Through the dynamic agency that can be detected within Atwood’s novels and that encompasses human, animal, and hybrid agency, the reader can develop empathy for other-than-human experiences and use this new perspective for a critical reflection of actual technoscientific developments that affect both human and nonhuman animal life. The combination of the two discourses reveals a value of science fiction for both the scientific community and society at large, demonstrating how its critical reception can result in enhanced ethical standards. (shrink)

Margaret Atwood’s most distinguishing novel is The Handmaid’s tale. The novel has two narrators. First, the story is told in the first person through the eyes of a protagonist and ostensible narrator called Offred. Atwood describes the course of Offred’s daily life under the oppressive regime of a patriarchal theocracy governed by religious fundamentalists. Second, the entire meaning of Offred’s story is altered by the thirteen-page appendix ‘Historical notes on The Handmaid’s Tale’ narrated by Professor Pieixoto. He (...) shocks and disorients the reader who encounters it after having spent nearly 300 affecting pages with Offred and her narration. In this regard, two possible worlds are constructed in The Handmaid’s Tale as the results of Offred’s narration and Pieixoto’s narration. This paper aims to study these two worlds from the viewpoint of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Following Lacan, Žižek argues that fantasy provides a framework through which we see reality. They are anamorphic so that they presuppose a point of view, denying us an objective account of the world. Accordingly, there are two anamorphic symbolic orders, or two anamorphic levels, in the novel: the first phase of anamorphic perspective attributes to the handmaids’ fantasy and the second phase relates to readers of the novel. (shrink)

Global climate change has been characterised as the crisis of reason (Val Plumwood), imagination (Amitav Ghosh) and language (Elizabeth Rush), to mention some. The 'everything change', as Margaret Atwood calls it, arguably also impacts on how we aesthetically perceive, interpret and appreciate nature. This article looks at philosophical theories of nature appreciation against global environmental change. The article examines how human-induced global climate change affects the 'scientific' approaches to nature appreciation which base aesthetic judgment on scientific knowledge and (...) the competing 'non-scientific' approaches which emphasise the role of emotions, imagination and stories in the aesthetic understanding of environment. The author claims that both approaches are threatened by global climate change and cannot continue as usual. In particular, he explores aesthetic imagination in contemporary times when our visions about environment are thoroughly coloured by worry and uncertainty and there seems to be little room for awe and wonder, which have traditionally characterised the aesthetic experience of nature. Finally, he proposes that art could stimulate environmental imagining in this age of uncertainty. (shrink)

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback shows how the book's accomplishment is to provide a Jungian analysis of the “shadow” of wealth: the primitive meanings attached to debt deriving from ancient cultural configurations of a proper balance in the order of things. Debt is conceived in terms of social obligations, of guilt and sin, of revenge, and as a plot that structures the narrative of human life. Instead of simply looking to the archaic meanings of debt for (...) its shadow side, this review attempts to take stock of what the recent credit crisis can teach us about the place of debt in our lives. It is a question of seeking out shadows that belong specifically to our global financial system, rather than belonging to ways of accounting order, honor, and revenge from a repressed past. If financial institutions, governments, businesses, and individuals were all exposed to high levels of debt, to whom was all this wealth owed? How does the shadow of debt affect economic behavior? Since debt forms the basis of further lending, debt increases through a multiplier effect without corresponding assets, which leads to an unstable system of virtuous or vicious cycles, and debt takes over some of the social, practical, and theoretical functions formerly held by God. (shrink)

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback centers on the observation that the book does not dwell on the unnatural face of interest and finance. In this era of financialization, debt has been thoroughly uncoupled from the concept of payback. The least valuable debt is the one that is promptly repaid. It is this aspect of debt—the interest, not the principal—that has attracted the richest tradition of social condemnation. As stable forms of production and exchange were replaced by (...) international arbitrage, the link between debt and sorcery became evident to observers around the world. More profoundly, Atwood's widely shared commonsense impression that consumer debt is a measure of self-indulgence does not hold up empirically. It turns out that our unprecedented levels of household indebtedness were overwhelmingly a function of nondiscretionary spending. Even as Americans owed one hundred percent of GDP in individual debt in 2008, the real Faustian bargain was not a “enjoy now, pay later” scheme for “glitzy, short-term junk.” The truth is much scarier, and points toward a different set of cultural and theological references than the ones Atwood investigates. The dividing line between solvency and insolvency, it turns out, is not consumption but reproduction: the most certain route to financial disaster is having a child. (shrink)

Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business (...) practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures. (shrink)

On one thing the whole world seems to agree: Globalization is homogenizing cultures. At least, a lot of countries are acting as if that’s the case. In the name of containing what the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood calls “the Great Star-Spangled Them,” the Canadian government subsidizes the nation’s film industry and requires radio stations to devote a percentage of their airtime to home-grown music, carving out extra airplay for stars such as Celine Dion and Barenaked Ladies. Ottawa also (...) discouraged Borders, the American book superstore, from entering the Canadian market out of fear that it would not carry enough Canadian literature. The French government spends some US $3 billion annually on culture and employs 12,000 cultural bureaucrats in an effort to preserve its vision of a uniquely French culture. Spain, South Korea and Brazil place binding domestic-content requirements on their cinemas; France and Spain do the same for television. Until recently, India barred the sale of Coca-Cola. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse by Jean-Paul EngélibertCyril CamusJean-Paul Engélibert. Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse [Fabulating the end of the world: The critical power of apocalypse fiction]. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2019. 239 pp. Print. 20€. ISBN 978-2-348-03719-1.Jean-Paul Engélibert is a well-established expert on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. His exploration of the genre thus far includes (...) the monograph Apocalypses sans royaume: Politique des fictions de la fin du monde, XX–XXIe siècles (2013), numerous articles, as well as the essay collection L’Apocalypse: Une imagination politique, XIXe–XXIe siècles (2018), which he co-edited. In his latest book, Fabuler la fin du monde, he returns to several texts and aspects of the genre previously covered, delving deeper into what he calls “fictions of the end of the world.” In the ten chapters, gathered in five parts, he approaches his subject as a seasoned scholar in the field of comparative literature, and his analysis draws from comparisons between modern fiction’s representation of apocalypse and biblical literature’s visions of apocalypse and messianism. The book also offers ecocritical insights into the specter of Anthropocenic manifestations in fiction, with reflections on the interrelated genres of utopia and dystopia, theories of cinema, and philosophical writings on the catastrophic history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.The range of fictional works discussed is wide, including Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Émile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846); Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883); Robert Merle’s Malevil (1972); José Saramago’s Blindness (1995); Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (1999); Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003); Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Céline Minard’s Le dernier monde (2007); Davide [End Page 163] Longo’s The Last Man Standing (2010); and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003], The Year of the Flood [2009], and MaddAddam [2013]). Engélibert also touches on feature-length movies such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2012), and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), as well as on other literary and audiovisual fictions, such as E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), Edward Bond’s dramatic trilogy The War Plays (1985), and the first season (2014) of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s TV series The Leftovers (2014–17).Engélibert’s exegeses of the genre build around two aspects of the evolving relationship of apocalyptic narratives to the context of their production. Apocalypse (in the sense of “the end of the world” rather than the etymological sense of “revelation”) is no longer primarily a religious myth: the creation and use of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the theorization of the Anthropocene, and the mainstreaming of concerns over climate change have made the term “apocalypse” a very real, tangible prospect for the future. Engélibert relies on Günther Anders’s Die atomare Drohung (1981) to highlight the importance of the A-bomb in bringing home the reality of potential annihilation to people’s collective consciousness. Yet his second contextual/historical point is that the Anthropocene (albeit unnamed at the time) actually started with the Industrial Revolution, and that thinkers and polemicists such as Charles Fourier or Eugène Huzar, as well as contemporary fiction writers, were already acknowledging the environmental impact of humans and their economic/industrial/technological activity as threats to human and nonhuman life, and to the health of the planetary system itself.1Citing the work of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil on the history of climate science, Engélibert analyzes in detail several nineteenth-century novels (namely Le Dernier homme, Frankenstein, Le monde tel qu’il sera, and Ignis) and one early-twentieth-century story (Forster’s “The Machine Stops”) that denounce the harm that the idol of the time, Progress, was already wreaking on nature and human life... (shrink)

Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious (...) Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered 'human'.Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship.Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds. (shrink)

Novels and short stories written since the last decades of the nineteenth century and employing discourses of technology have contributed to shaping the idea of the “posthuman condition” in the West to such a degree that some critics already feel entitled to announce the Age of the Posthuman. This essay interrogates some of the embarrassingly quixotic proposals of posthumanism, taking H. G. Wells's Time Machine, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as paradigmatic texts exploring patterns (...) of mutation, virtuality, and bioengineering. In their concern for the apocalyptic and their sometime depiction of the glorious moment of Herculean victory over classical “human” man, these novels articulate the Western self's undaunted desire for the perfect Other, implying critical and even ironic gestures that question the propagation of a “new” human condition or the idea of absolute boundaries of the human. (shrink)

Although translations and interpretations of the Tao te Ching abound and new editions are released yearly, few accomplish the hard work of linking and bridging the Tao's profound message to the needs of modern readers. There may be a profusion of versions, but our lives and our world reflect little of the deep, transformative potential of this important text. Marc S. Mullinax's new translation grows from extensive teaching experience and combines a deep understanding of the Tao's fourth-century BCE Chinese context (...) with an exciting two-part application of that text to contemporary life. First, each of the eighty-one verses is joined by a richly curated array of quotes, sayings, poems, and stories from wisdom traditions around the globe. With quotes ranging from Emerson to Pink Floyd, and from the apostle Paul to Margaret Atwood, the Tao's meaning comes alive in conversation with others. Second, a brief reflection puts the verse in historical context and highlights the transformative power of Wu-Wei, the "non-interfering action, perfectly timed, to promote peace and prevent injury," to bring joy and justice to a hurting world. (shrink)

This article takes the recent rash of unwanted pregnancy films, such as 2007's Juno and Knocked Up, as an opportunity to revisit Margaret Atwood's influential 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale. It argues that the novel deals with the same themes the films evoke during a pivotal time for reproductive politics, generally, and abortion politics, specifically. It argues that the novel offers several lessons and warnings on the nature of reproductive politics that are still relevant today. These lessons are (...) connected to how and why these films are able to `make sense' in naturalizing their heroines' choice to keep an unwanted pregnancy. (shrink)

Chapter 15: "'What you do hurts all of us!' When women confront women through pro-life rhetoric." -/- In this chapter, I articulate a specific problem in the way the rhetoric and ideology of pro-life politics operates as a form of confrontation between women. This is a dilemma that emerges when women engage in the appearance of concern and solicitude while passively coercing other women as they may be ambivalent and vulnerable in forcing anti-abortion outcomes. This in a reinvestment in the (...) problem I raise in my prior work, The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (2017), a dilemma that I think is essential to grapple with if not also to urgently reconcile: where is the solidarity among women as they are pregnant, independent of the outcomes or expectations of childbearing? Alongside of the testimony of my own personal experience, I analyze the substance of the confrontation narrated in Maisie Crow’s documentary Jackson (2016), juxtaposing it with the fictional hypothesis of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1998) to outline the character of harm in the confrontations between women through pro-life discourse. (shrink)

Within this paper, I critique the history of the modification of the broiler chicken through selective breeding and possible future genetic modification. I utilize Margaret Atwood’s fictitious depiction of genetically engineered chickens, from her novel Oryx and Crake , in order to forward the argument that modifications that eliminate animal telos either move beyond the range of current ethical frameworks or can be ethically defended by them. I then utilize the work of feminist epistemologists to argue that understanding (...) what it means to be a chicken shapes our conceptions of what modifications are or are not acceptable. Taking into account justifications stemming from practical knowledge when making ontological claims can help to shift our understanding of what animal modifications can or cannot be justified. The paper ends by addressing three possible problems brought about by accepting such justifications. (shrink)

What happens when a debtor does not pay back what he or she owes? As Margaret Atwood's chapter on “The Shadow Side” shows, the unpaid debt—in the broadest sense—is a recurring theme of history and literature. This review essay looks at the fourteenth-century village, a world which, perhaps contrary to expectations, turns out to have been characterized by a large number of outstanding interpersonal debts of money and goods. We know about these debts because the creditors were obliged (...) to use local courts in order to recover them. Remarks are offered on the circumstances that led to so many individuals being sued for debt, in particular English villages in this period. Discussion then focuses on the extent to which the proliferation of unpaid debts between villagers led to tensions or a breakdown in trust within rural society. The essay concludes with comments on the character and functions of institutions and rules that have developed in this and other societies to deal with the “won't pay” tendencies of human beings. (shrink)

Of the most recent turn to literary practices in contemporary art, this article studies one facet: that which relates to the lyric tradition. It hopes to make a case for ‘lyric images’, drawing on the works by artists Tacita Dean, Day for Night (2009), and Roni Horn, Still Water [...] (1999). Read around poems by Emily Dickinson, John Fuller and Margaret Atwood, how these artworks utilize photography’s natural capacity to mirror both the recursive syntactic structure and the blending (...) of instantaneity with immortality common to the lyric poem is explored. Particularly, the article considers notions of cyclical seriality – as composed of singular moments, yet tending towards the infinite – both formally and referentially. Whether these qualities provoke an imaginative and/or emotive looking that contrasts with our response to previous assumptions of the written form in conceptual art practices (e.g. Art and Language) is also reflected upon, in order to contemplate why this particular hybridising may be current in photographic practice. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to approach the long literary tradition of catastrophic or apocalyptic narratives in relation to natural disasters and to explore examples of ecological threats to human species in contemporary Anglophone literature. By using the concept of ecophobia – a widespread irrational fear for nature – the author analyses novels by George R. Stewart ( Storm and Earth Abides ) and by Margaret Atwood ( Oryx and Crake ). Among the shared traits of these (...) novels, the author highlights the uncertain relationship with supernatural entities or divinities, the presence of surviving characters acting like last men of a disappearing human civilization, and the role of the humanities in the survival of the human species. (shrink)

You are what you eat: thinking food otherwise -- Georges Bataille's pornographic food -- Samuel Beckett's alimentary Cogito -- Food, the fall, and the detective: the case of Paul Auster -- Food in Margaret Atwood's Dystopias -- Modernism, postmodernism, and the otherwise of eating.

This thesis is the first major study of censorship of and in English Canadian literature. While there are several reasons scholars have focused on censorship in Europe and the United States, it is the ascendancy in quality and quantity of Canadian writing leading to its further use in institutions where censorship takes place---such as schools and libraries---that necessitates a study of censorship in Canadian literature now. This rise in censorship has prompted Canadian authors increasingly to write about the subject. In (...) this thesis I study censorship issues raised both explicitly md implicitly by Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Beatrice Culleton and Marlene Nourbese Philip. All of these writers have been subjected to censorship attacks and have responded to these attacks and grappled with the philosophical implications of censorship in their fiction and non-fiction. My investigation of censorship in these texts sheds new light on the works of literature themselves, but the literary texts also suggest a new way of looking at censorship. Each of my chapters offers arguments challenging the traditional Enlightenment model of censorship as an oppressive government practice against its citizens, a definition resulting in the mistaken views that censorship has been largely eradicated in the West and that, when it does surface, it is to be condemned on principle. This view can be contrasted with a "constructivist" model of censorship as the delegitimation of expression by social forces. My findings support a definition which draws on both models wherein censorship is the exclusion of some discourse as the result of a judgment by an authoritative agent based on some ideological predisposition. The key word in this definition is "judgment" which, when recognized as the primary activity in censorship, must change the way we approach censorship controversies. For if censorship is the exercise of judgment, and judgment is enmeshed in the fabric of human endeavour, then censorship is inevitable in our society. Since censorship is inevitable, I conclude, we should stop arguing about whether censorship itself is a desirable practice and begin to find ways to make censorship practices more reasonable or more "just.". (shrink)

Two recent novels, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, are philosophically instructive. These books are interesting, I argue, because they reveal something about understanding and appreciating narrative. They show us that audience’s participation in narrative is much more subtle and complex than philosophers generally acknowledge. An analysis of these books reveals that narrative imagining is not static or unified, but dynamic and multipolar. I argue that once the complexity of narrative engagement is better understood, some (...) prominent philosophical problems and debates concerning narrative dissolve. (shrink)

Using selections from writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree jr., and many others, this collection shows how the imagined worlds of science fiction create hold experiments for testing feminist hypotheses and for interpreting philosophical questions about humanity, gender, equality and more. Four main themes: Part 1, 'Human nature and reality', concentrates on whether there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Part 2, 'Dystopias: the worst (...) of all possible worlds', portrays misogynistic societies uncomfortably familiar to the early 21st-century reader. Part 3, 'Separatist utopias: worlds of difference', assembles stories that scrutinize both the virtues and vices of separatism. In Part 4, 'Androgynous utopias: worlds of equality', the authors create worlds that anticipate the consequences, good and bad, of perfect sexual equality in education, intelligence, capability, and reproduction. (shrink)

This article investigates the critical potential of a contemporary dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller 2017-), a U.S. television series adapted from a popular novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1985). The text is widely understood as a feminist intervention that speaks to ongoing struggles against gender oppression, but in this article I consider the invitations that the show offers its viewers in treating race the way that it does, and consider what it means to refuse these invitations in (...) pursuit of a critical feminist understanding of authority, legal subjectivity, and violence. Drawing on the recent turn to genre, my reading focuses on how whiteness is reproduced through this cinematic text and its inculcation of particular ways of seeing, modes of identification and attachment. The Handmaid’s Tale’s post-racial aesthetic means that its thematic engagement with gender, sexuality and resistance actively disavows national and international histories of racist state violence and white supremacy. Its problematic feminism is thus uniquely instructive for understanding how whiteness is reproduced in contemporary (neo)liberal configurations of legal subjectivity and state authority. (shrink)

Although canon-formation is, as Lecker suggests, a product of rhetoric and textual choices of critics, it is also a product of economic forces, political conflicts, and cultural expectations of coherence, “order,” and unitary explanation. Conditioned by some or all of these, an essay ostensibly skeptical of canons, as this one appears to be, can find itself nevertheless contributing to the thing it questions. In attempting to attribute the formation of a single national canon to a specific period , to a (...) specific and allegedly homogeneous group of actors , and to a specific social phenomenon , Lecker’s essay becomes another constructor of canonical text and theory. Behind its arguments that a canon suddenly came into being are fairly precise assumptions not only about “Canadian critics” but also about what constitutes canonicity, and about the relative legitimacy of canonicity claims. “At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon,” his essay begins . Is a school curriculum the only possible context for the attainment of literary “legitimacy”? Can there be no canon if a literature has no curriculum, education publishers, or “academic critics,” or if it has not been institutionalized as an “independent” subject? Frank Davey, chair of the department of English at York University, is the author of From There to Here: A Guide to English Canadian Literature Since 1960 , Surviving the Paraphrase , Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics , and Reading Canadian Reading . He is also the editor of Open Letter and the on-line magazine Swiftcurrent. He is currently working on a study of nationalist ideologies in Canadian fiction entitled National Arguments. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article contributes to a better understanding of dystopia’s practical aims by offering a critical defense of what Gregory Claeys calls the “Atwood Principle.” Derived from the writings of Canadian author Margaret Atwood, it establishes a yardstick for separating speculative fiction from science fiction. I argue that, rather than elevating it to the status of a genre definer, the Atwood Principle should be vindicated in terms of a heuristic device for contextually identifying the central mechanism (...) underpinning dystopias: warning through extrapolation. The real challenge, then, is how to make sense of the complex functioning of extrapolation. Instead of viewing it in mechanistic terms, my suggestion is to envisage extrapolation as a dynamic process involving both realism and estrangement. I illustrate this through a contrast between two kinds of stories about the current climate emergency: cautionary and post-cautionary tales of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

A considerable amount of academic attention has been paid to John Kennedy and to his group of advisors during the Cuban missile crisis. Next to no attention has been accorded other bodies of the Kennedy White House that had daily access to a President's most private moments and possibly to his important deliberations. Drawing on Richard Reeves' account of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, I revisit the early 1960s looking for bodies of power that are culturally sexed female by others (...) and compelled into being as workaday secretaries and confidants, and para-Everythings for Kennedy. In doing so, I draw on the feminist body theorizing of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as the evocations of bodies in important but abjected places featured in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. After constructing the historically broad category of the handmaid to Washington power, I reread constructions of decision-making in the Cuban missile crisis offered by Graham Allison and conclude that the feint of mancentred Washington masks bodies given the locations, skills and resources to ooze into spaces of decision and power canonically forbidden to them. (shrink)

In Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics Shauna L. Shames and Amy L. Atchison aim to give the readers an insight into various key concepts in political science by analyzing some of the world's most famous dystopian fictional works. Among them are George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but also more recent novels such as Scott Westerfield's 2005 Uglies Trilogy. In separate chapters, the authors draw on a wide array of concepts in political (...) philosophy to confront real-life and fictional dystopias. The book makes for an excellent introduction to political theory that is highly approachable to dilettantes.The book consists of eight chapters, a preface, an introduction, an... (shrink)