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Canadian author and environmental activist Margaret Atwood, who has just received the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels, has published more than 40 books of fiction and poetry to date, and is also a renowned literary critic. The so-called MaddAddam trilogy belongs to her more recent work of speculative fiction, which, according to Atwood, is different from Science Fiction because "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." (Unsurprisingly, this definition has been contested by many critics and writers.) Apart from discussing questions of genre and narratology, we will explore her near-future economic, political, and environmental depiction of American and global society by analyzing her novels Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). We will learn about Snowman/Jimmy, who is sitting on a tree after a man-made global epidemic has eliminated the whole human species (or has it not?) but left alive a variety of newly created species--even a human one with blue skin and green eyes; we will encounter a religious group that is strictly vegetarian and tries to survive in this (post-)apocalyptic world, and in the end, there will be a showdown between humans and new, bioengineered species.
Please buy the following editions:
Oryx and Crake (Virago, 2013), The Year of the Flood (Virago, 2013), and MaddAddam (Virago, 2014).
Requirements: readings, active participation, abstract of paper project, research paper (10-12 pages) |
