Abstract
Abstract
Telling Stories About Animals: The Evolution of Moral Storytelling
in Margaret Atwood's Oryx
and Crake and The Year of the Flood
By Jennifer Leigh Nelson
For many scholars in the humanities, the notion of combining the
often diametrically opposed
fields of the humanities and sciences creates a curious kind of
anxiety. This anxiety can be
traced from the tension surrounding the publication of Darwin's
works on evolutionary theory in
the 19th century to the present lagging nature of the humanities in
incorporating evolution into
the study of literature. The recent critical school of Literary
Darwinism as well as the first two
speculative works of fiction in what will eventually comprise
Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam
Trilogy challenge this opposition. For my thesis, I have chosen
to focus on the animals that
populate the landscape of Atwood's fiction and remain essentially
linked to humans on the
continuum that Darwinists seek to evoke. I specifically examine the
novels' human-animal
relationships in conversation with Literary Darwinist theory in
order to reveal an urgent need for
interdisciplinary dialogue. In my discussion of Oryx and
Crake, I explore the destructive
implications of using a strictly humanities perspective to ignore
the empathetic instinct toward
other nonhuman animal species. My analysis of The Year of the
Flood examines Atwood's
imagined means of restoring an inter-human and interspecies empathy
to the universe of her
speculative fiction. My thesis argues that Atwood's creation of a
religious narrative in which an
ethical relationship to animals possesses an evolutionary function
demonstrates the survival
value of drawing connections between the humanities and sciences--a
value that extends itself to
the study of literature at large as well as the broader perspective
of humanity's survival.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction: Storytelling with
Animals....................................................................................
1
Chapter One: Jimmy-Snowman's Destructive Storytelling in Oryx
and Crake ........................... 9
Chapter Two: Storytelling and Forgiveness in The Year of the
Flood ....................................... 31
Conclusion: Evolution and the
Imagination................................................................................
59
Works
Cited..............................................................................................................................
64
About this Honors Thesis
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