About midway through Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, the protagonist Jimmy (later known as Snowman, survivor of a genetically engineered global epidemic induced by his childhood friend, Crake) leaves home for the university, or in this case for the Martha Graham Academy. In a culture driven by the collusion of technology and capital it's not surprising that the best students are sent to lavish technical universities (Crake attends the Watson–Crick Institute), while arts and humanities students listlessly rusticate at Martha Graham, learning the pointless yet “vital arts” of “acting, singing, dancing, and so forth” and how to deploy them in the service of commodity culture (Jimmy's skill with language leads him to major in Applied Rhetoric, eventually writing advertising copy for Crake's new life forms). Like much else in Oryx and Crake, Atwood's vision jibes chillingly enough with the rhetoric of today's corporate university: compared to jet propulsion, cancer research, or even the battle of Appomattox (on my campus, history is a social science), the arts and humanities can be made to seem “like studying Latin, or book binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything” (187).
Extinctathon: Margaret Atwood’s Urge for an Immanent Episteme in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
