Margaret Atwood • Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood http://www.web.net/owtoad/jpgphoto.html
Biographical Info. • b. 1939 in Ottawa • Grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. • BA from Victoria College at U of T; MA from Radcliffe College.
40+ years of writing; 25+ volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction • former president of PEN, Canada • many awards and honourary degrees • critical work on Canadian fiction; power of the Canadian landscape • The Handmaid’s Tale (1983)
from “In the Secular Night” (1995) There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.
Usual suspects • point-of-view? (how?) • narrative arc/chronology? (what?) • setting (where?) • characterization (who?)
intertextuality • Definition: a relationship between two or more texts that quote from each other, allude to each other, or otherwise connect • Meaning resides with the reader • Interdependence of texts
hypertextuality • Postmodernist term: the interconnectedness of all literary works and their interpretations
inter/hypertextuality in Oryx and crake • Robinson Crusoe (1719) • The Bible • post-apocalyptic science fiction
http://redmarketer.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/robinson_crusoe.jpghttp://redmarketer.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/robinson_crusoe.jpg
Post-Apocalyptic literature • term comes from the Apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelations in the Christian Bible, though there is are end-of-the-world stories in other religions as well • other terms: post-holocaust literature; end-of-the-world literature
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Durer) http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/durer-07.jpg
long tradition in science fiction: H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is an early example http://imagecache.allposters.com/images/pic/MEPOD/10012341~The-War-of-the-Worlds-a-Martian-Machine-Contemplates-the-Drunken-Crowd-Posters.jpg
one of the most common sf themes with “cross-over writers” like Atwood, George Orwell: why might that be?
various conflagrations — atomic war, comet striking Earth, plague, pestilence, alien invasion — that can often be related to contemporary anxieties • Popular right now. Can you name some films? Why might they be finding an audience today?
questions about the future • What is Atwood’s vision of the future? What does she see as the source for the apocalypse? • Which current trends does she extrapolate from? To what end?
Questions about genre • What is Atwood doing by referring to Robinson Crusoe? • How does (or, Does?) this novel relate to some of the traditional literary genres we’ve studied, such as the Bildungsroman?
Science Fiction • “Science Fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terresial in origin.” Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (London 1960) • http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf_defn.html
“Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.” Ray Bradbury
“Therefore, no matter how the world makes out in the next few centuries, a large class of readers at least will not be too surprised at anything. They will have been through it all before in fictional form, and will not be too paralysed with astonishment to try to cope with contingencies as they arise.” L. Sprague De Camp
“Science Fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.” James E. Gunn, Introduction, The Road To Science Fiction, Vol 1, NEL, New York 1977
Genre? • Is this novel science fiction? Or http://home.comcast.net/~prturbodog/paulreavis/pfcontent/illustration/squid.jpg
is it ... • A Parable?: “a short simple story which teaches or explains an idea, especially a moral or religious idea” • A Fable?: “a fictitious narration intended to enforce some useful truth or precept”
