Literary dynamics in The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Interaction between text and reader is a prominent concern in stylistics. This paper focusses on interactions among stylistic processes and subconscious microcognitive processes that generate changes to narrative and interpretation during reading. Drawing on process philosophy and recent neuroscientific research, I articulate this dynamism through analysis of a brief narrative moment from each of The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I argue that high densities of stylistic and microcognitive perturbations lead to frequent narrative and interpretive changes in the two moments. The analyses reinforce portrayals of reading as intensely complex, dynamic and changeable. Complexity, dynamism and mutability also characterise the stylistic changes in the two narrative moments. This paper advocates greater attention to the role of volatile stylistic and cognitive microdynamics in shaping the reading of prose fiction.

COVID-19 Infodemic: A New Historicist Analysis of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This research intends to explore the current calamitous situation of Covid-19 in the context of <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, mirroring how Covid-19 and <i>Oryx and Crake</i> are linked through the perception of unification and the consciousness of the world as a whole by holding the entire world hostage. It vigorously examines the disease being presented as a weapon of mass destruction, followed by a conspiracy theory, the reality of the present and fancy of the future, generating a feeling of mingled contradiction, a psychological aspect, and stout human response to the unpredicted as some shared themes between the two. The potential strength of the New Historicism was found applicable in contextualizing COVID-19 and <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, which explore and project forward the biotechnological, social, political, cultural, economic, and climatic givens of the pandemic ridden world. It involves a parallel study of a literary work, interpreting events as the products of time. The textual interpretation was based on observation of historical context to see how following pandemics of the past may allow today’s world to detect the fundamental causes of such diseases. Understanding the pandemic through intellectual history highlighted the consequences of unscrupulous exploitation of bio-engineering threats, a sense of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity, biotech corporations, and marketing genetically engineered life forms.

COVID-19 Infodemic: A New Historicist Analysis of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This research intends to explore the current calamitous situation of Covid-19 in the context of <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, mirroring how Covid-19 and <i>Oryx and Crake</i> are linked through the perception of unification and the consciousness of the world as a whole by holding the entire world hostage. It vigorously examines the disease being presented as a weapon of mass destruction, followed by a conspiracy theory, the reality of the present and fancy of the future, generating a feeling of mingled contradiction, a psychological aspect, and stout human response to the unpredicted as some shared themes between the two. The potential strength of the New Historicism was found applicable in contextualizing COVID-19 and <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, which explore and project forward the biotechnological, social, political, cultural, economic, and climatic givens of the pandemic ridden world. It involves a parallel study of a literary work, interpreting events as the products of time. The textual interpretation was based on observation of historical context to see how following pandemics of the past may allow today’s world to detect the fundamental causes of such diseases. Understanding the pandemic through intellectual history highlighted the consequences of unscrupulous exploitation of bio-engineering threats, a sense of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity, biotech corporations, and marketing genetically engineered life forms.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as a Critique of Technological Utopianism

While there are major works tracing the themes of belonging and longing for home in contemporary fiction, there is no current study adequately addressing the connection between dystopian novel and nostalgia. This paper aims to illustrate how the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood uses nostalgia as a framework to level a critique against technological utopianism in her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake (2003). The first novel in Atwood’s “MaddAddam Trilogy” problematizes utopian thought by focusing on the tension between two utopian projects: the elimination of all suffering and the perfection of human beings by discarding their weaknesses. Despite the claims of scientific objectivity and environmentalism, the novel exposes the religious and human-centered origins of Crake’s technological utopian project. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is an ambiguous work of science fiction that combines utopian and dystopian elements into its narrative to criticize utopian thought.

Women, Nature, and Culture: Patriarchy and Phalloecntrism in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

This paper tackles patriarchy and phallocentrism's concepts by shedding light on women, culture, and nature. Margaret Atwood's novels Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are examined in terms of the concepts mentioned above. Atwood's novels and literary works can be examined in light of the concepts of patriarchy and phallocentrism based on environmental ethics. Through the study of these two novels, this paper attempts to elicit the signs regarding the cultural-ecological discourses and women's conditions as they are trapped in a male-centered society. Besides, it stresses nature's conditions whereby natural objects are undermined and are in the same miserable conditions as women. Then, applying these two concepts in the novels, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are thoroughly explored along with the male/female and culture/nature dualisms question. Keywords: Ecofeminism, Margaret Atwood, Patriarchy, Phallocentrism

Beckett, Atwood, and Postapocalyptic Tragicomedy

Ecological catastrophe has challenged the contemporary novel to find forms that convey the scale and affective conditions of life amid looming planetary devastation. While sincere tragedy has been the dominant mode and tone of the novel's approach, recent scholarship has explored the possibilities of the comic, which presents its own limitations and ethical problems. This article argues that Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake moves past these limitations of genre and tone through engagements with the more complicated tragicomic sensibility of Samuel Beckett. The tragicomic first offers Atwood a mode that better conveys the complexity of mixed possible fortunes and futures amid ecological catastrophe while it also better evokes the strange, often contradictory affects of life in the Anthropocene. Yet Atwood sees greater promise in Beckett's tragicomedy beyond his mere endurance of unchangeable existential conditions. She instead repurposes the tragicomic for the ecological and political needs of the contemporary to produce “survival laughter,” an attitude that recognizes the tragic conditions of catastrophe but simultaneously uses comedy to protect the psyche from despair in the face of devastation. Unlike Beckett's laughter that merely endures entropic decline, Atwood's survival laughter opens the possibility for dynamic, creative action oriented to the hope of transformation and flourishing, even amid seemingly total loss. Through tragicomic survival laughter, Atwood moves the ecological novel beyond its dominant mode of sincere tragic disaster while also avoiding the pitfalls of pure comedy to instead imagine more integrated and realistic forms of ecological resilience that powerfully combine mitigation and adaptation.