Did Margaret Atwood’s portrayal of a pandemic in “Oryx and Crake” prove to be an accurate scenario of a doomsday event?
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ENGL 252 Fa25
The Novel and the Anthropocene
Did Margaret Atwood’s portrayal of a pandemic in “Oryx and Crake” prove to be an accurate scenario of a doomsday event?
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The “accurate” is tricky, since the answer to his question will use the novel as a mirror of something outside it. Two problems: a) we don’t generally judge novels on whether they tell us “how things really happened” (that’s more the province of history); and b) novels often construct new realities designed to make us reflect in new ways on our actual, social reality. So your question might ask about the terms of Atwood’s imaginative construction of a pandemic and argue about what that construction means: how does it represent democracy at a moment of hyperinequality?; what does the fantasy of extinguishing/reengineering life tell us about Silicon Valley’s technocratic impulses?; etc. I’m not saying these are your questions, or the best questions, but they put the focus on the text and now the world outside it.