Especially if you’re an English major, and even if you’re not but are shopping for an English class next term, swing by on Wednesday afternoon to our semesterly open house, with food and beverages, faculty pitching new courses, and a chance to chat with fellow majors and faculty. Details below:

Are you an English major or English major-curious? Come meet faculty and other students at our Fall Welcome event! Faculty will provide information about Hunter and English department resources and our fabulous new faculty members will introduce themselves. Food and drink provided!

Date/Time: Wed Oct 8th,  4-5:30pm

Location: FDA Faculty Lounge, 8th floor HW

In Chapter 10 of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood critiques the diminishing importance of the humanities and the arts in a world increasingly dominated by scientific, technological, and corporate priorities. Through Jimmy’s journey at the Martha Graham Academy and his later career, Atwood reveals a society where the arts are deemed redundant and insignificant, contributing little to social or economic development. Unlike his scientifically adept friend Crake, Jimmy is attracted to language, literature, and storytelling. However, these passions marginalize him in society. He is sent to the Martha Graham Academy, a lesser-known institution named after the renowned dancer, which symbolizes a time when the arts were more highly esteemed. The Academy offers courses such as “Problematics,” “Dead Languages,” and “Comparative Literature,” fields depicted as antiquated and lacking practical application. The school is regarded as a fallback for students who did not qualify for prestigious science institutions like the Watson-Crick Institute, which Crake attends. This educational hierarchy reflects a broader cultural perspective: scientific and business achievements are celebrated, while the arts are merely endured. Jimmy’s career trajectory further illustrates this notion. Despite his intelligence and creativity, his proficiency in language leads him to advertising and corporate manipulation, where he must influence consumer behavior instead of pursuing meaningful artistic endeavors. In this reality, language loses its aesthetic and ethical significance and becomes solely a tool for persuasion and economic gain. This commercialization of language signifies a wider cultural transformation where beauty, philosophy, and human emotion are only appreciated if they can generate revenue. Atwood employs Jimmy’s solitude and emotional richness to emphasize the losses incurred when a society neglects the humanities. In contrast to Crake’s cold logic and emotional detachment, Jimmy experiences profound feelings and grapples with finding purpose in a world that dismisses his values. Through his character, Atwood posits that the humanities are crucial to balance the advancement of science, anchored in empathy, ethical contemplation, and an understanding of the human experience. In conclusion, Chapter 10 portrays a dystopian future where the arts and humanities have been progressively undervalued. Atwood cautions against the perils of elevating technological progress above human insight, demonstrating how such a transition can lead to a society that is spiritually and morally impoverished.

Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” takes us on a journey to a not so distant future of ruin and despair, shrouded by a bleak reality of the end of the human race. Although a prevalent topic throughout the read is the role of sex among homo-sapiens, I’d like to focus the attention to the connection with the Anthropocene and our reality. Donna Haraway’s piece on the Anthropocene is not just a definition of the term, but an analysis of all the human contributions to the destruction of life on earth. There are many direct causes of this such as pollution from factories and indirect causes that may seem to not have long lasting effects…until they do.  She puts a big emphasis on the Anthropocene not only referring to the impact of man on the climate, but rather the environment as a whole. “I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense…All critters share a common “flesh,” laterally, semiotically, and genealogically.”; Haraway strongly believes that humans should expand their mindsets beyond mere classification of living organisms as distinct beings. Instead, we should consider ourselves, and our organic friends, as one thing; residents of the earth.

I feel as though Atwood derived much of the inspiration for the content of her book from Haraway’s philosophy. Although a work of fiction, much of the concepts and themes are one to one with our day to day such as big advertisers putting advertising on a pedestal to market deceiving products to the masses and industries disrupting the natural order of things. Much like Jimmy’s parents and his best friend Crake, they aided in combining animals and altering their genetic makeup under the ruse of positivity for the human race. However it should be noted that Crake himself reveals the importance of creating problems to profit off solutions. Some would say pharmaceutical companies manufacture drugs advertised to cure illnesses for people that cause a long list of side effects on purpose. If you cure the world, you end the business; that’s horrible for the bank. 

Even at the core, Atwood is subtle, yet direct in saying that humans have  been and will be their own downfall. Crake’s life work was intended to produce the perfect human-like entities without the flaws of humans. However, by the conclusion of the book, his project is showing signs of “failure”. To put it simply, you can take the Craker away from humans but you can’t take the human out of the Craker.

Ironically, the thing that we pose so much importance on, humanity, as the center of the universe, has been unconsciously devalued through the monopolization of the scientific institution. This idea reflects in the death of art, exemplified through the Martha Graham Institution. Once a prolific school of the arts, it has now become a creative wasteland. The expression of humanity becomes obsolete in a highly digitized, instantaneous, formulaic, and transactional society. Even mediums such as film making and video arts become arbitrary- there is no craft to it anymore, “anyone with a computer could splice together whatever they wanted…” (Atwood 96). There is no value in art with no process. Eerily resonant of today’s contemporary usage of AI integrating itself into creative industries such as music, film, and visual art, this begs the question of just how far we are from this reality of hyper-capitalist and mechanic ways of being. This process of mass producing creative capital goes hand in hand with how transactional art becomes. Elites ceased to invest in an institution that had no place anymore, “…endowment had been sought in more down-to-earth arenas…” (Atwood 111). What Jimmy describes as “contemporary arenas”, areas of study that can still make profit. Art is, in my personal conception, an exercise of humanness. Its why it cannot be replicated by a machine, there is something raw and breathing inside of it that makes it stand out. Its what makes it different from other areas of study; its not formulaic, structured, bounded to some kind of rule. To me, its the most genuine mirror, it comes out unformed, naturally. Despite what was said about more “down-to-earth” investments…

The base of this idea of humanity becoming transactional additionally appears  in the tonality of Crake on the topic of love. Crake seems to embody this new genius-generation, cold to the emotionality or unconventional passions of humans. He describes love as an unnecessary phenomenon, a biological malfunction. He seeks, and as we know eventually conceives, this sort of impersonal reproductive cycle that eradicates even the possibility of something like unrequited love or heartbreak. This severe aversion to discomfort that you see in a lot of dystopian/futuristic depictions in media, (think of the Flintstones watching tv to exercise while still being able to lay in bed), dehumanizes people to the point of being complacent robots. The value of life is not as great as the push for progress and expansion. People are destroyed by it, murdered playing a lifeless puppet of experimental cosmetics, sanctioned into poverty and homelessness for “efficiency” (Happicuppa), exploited under this meritless fad of helpfulness, that, in actuality is marketing for an endless money grab.

Ive come to the understanding that Oryx’s sexually violent and traumatic history stems from this as well. This class struggle that sanctions large groups of peoples into poverty and famine was directly the cause for the village to allow a kind of man like that to take their children. It forces people to live in desperation. And this massive industry’s climate effects superimposed their isolation and dire situation, they were unable to feed themselves unless they sold their own children. Humanity, transactional once again. Furthermore, it’s horrifying to see how these sorts of structures are internalized. Oryx was conditioned from the age of eight to believe her value to be monetary, and that this was reliable, therefore more practical, than being loved. Crake sees love as an obstacle, a burden. It is the fault of those in power, not the village, the young students, these vulnerable peoples. They are essentially at the will of this brutalizing force, and, ostensibly, had to watch a world die in which they had no hands.