(Note: I plan to update this over the coming days with a few more sources, but I’ve posted the minimum required 5 on thursday.)

Bracke, Astrid. “The Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, edited by John Parham, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 88–101.

• This essay’s view of time plays a small role in my essay. Bracke mentions how climate fictions build their world through the main character’s recollections, which is huge in Oryx and Crake. Primarily, however, I would like to point out how Oryx and Crake is not a story of the future but one of the present. It points to the ontology of our present (and future and past, surely) rather than acting as a guidebook from the future, the ending explicitly denies giving us a right way to act (denies teaching us), Snowman is only met with four choices (make peace, trade, rob, or kill) and sort of dumped into the abyss of freedom. Bracke’s comments on other humans being dangerous competition in anthropocene fictions are also useful in terms of the novel’s ending, in a different way. 

Canavan, Gerry. “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” Marquette University ePublications, Marquette University, 2010, epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac/29/.

• Canavan and Thorpe give very similar reading. For both of them, the novel’s relation to history and political action is key. They both critique the novels for a certain “primitivist” outlook that comes about with leaving the future to the noble savages, the Crakers. In a really respectable reading, Canavan erects a view of Oryx and Crake as a dystopian and reactionary work, only to tear this down and claim that the Crakers as a whole are only a satire of (certain) utopian posthuman lines of thought that view human nature as the downfall of humanity (as opposed to the structure of human society) and subsequently try to escape catastrophe by escaping humanity. He finally reads the ending as a performative disproving of Crake’s “cold, scientistic” system of thought, because it presents a choice that requires human rationality to be made, and thus goes beyond genetic and hormonal determinations. He says the novels conclude with the idea that there is no hope for humanity as we live now, that our way of living within this system is “genuinely doomed,” but that this “asserts through allegory” just how urgent it is that we change this way of life. As far as the historicist manner of reading these novels goes, this one seems less palatable than Thorpe’s, however, it’s given me a lot of openings through which to propose my own reading. This is because it includes, what I think is, a bad reading of Snowman’s mythology to the Crakers and the Extinctathon game (both of which my conceptual device of the missing signifier has a lot to say about). One strange choice that I like but don’t know what to do with is the reading of Crake’s engineered virus as tantamount to Fredric Jameson’s concept of the radical break, which is what utopian forms use to simply show us that fundamental change is possible. (Note: This is the third article to mention that Atwood refuses the term “science fiction” in favor of “speculative fiction,” this makes me really happy because it draws a semantic connection to Hegel who explicitly and repeatedly called his own philosophy a speculative one.) 

Ciobanu, Calina. “Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Minnesota Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2014, pp. 153–62, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/563078.

• Ciobanu’s take seems to follow Canavan’s take in his critical work on the first two novels, namely, that the apocalypse is actually an opening to imagine a new society. It washes away the old order built on rape, colonization, etc. in order to open the space of utopia (the anthropocene is only the end of man/anthropos). Ciobanu’s reading really hits on the importance of sexuality and sexual difference in Atwood’s trilogy, unlike most other essays. Ciobanu claims that women in Atwood’s trilogy represent universality and a certain respect for irreducible difference. Although the conflation of universality and differences (perhaps the right word would be singularity) is quite strange to me, I will take this essay along with me as I develop my reading of Oryx’s character. 

Jameson, Fredric. “The Religions of Dystopia.” Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, Verso, 2024, pp. 181–86.

• What I find useful in this essay is Jameson’s account of the Crakers and the description of religion. I also fully agree with his takes on Crake being God (whereas Canavan would have him as Moses) to the Crakers. I also think, if we follow the biblical allusion side of things, Snowman is truly the figure of Moses. He leads an exodus of a missing character’s chosen people, leaves them for a while and returns to find them worshipping a huge idol, throws a huge blanket over himself and carries a big stick on his voyage (spitting image of a wandering desert Jew on his way back from Egypt), etc. I have found I can only make limited use of this essay because of its greater focus on the second novel of the trilogy, but his take on catastrophe sort of setting the table for utopia has huge importance for my discussion. Also, his mention of Freud and the concept of “big Other” has some importance for me (although it doesn’t go beyond a single paragraph).

Thorpe, Charles. “Postmodern Neo-Romanticism and the End of History in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 103, no. 2, 2020, pp. 216–42, https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.103.2.0216. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.

• This essay is immensely close to my reading (with one key difference) and I got a few really interesting ideas while reading this. Thorpe uses a different definition for the  “End of History” to the one I subscribe to. He essentially uses Fukuyama’s (which Fukuyama thought he got from Hegel) while I agree with Hegel’s. The reading of the Philosophy of History’s end of history championed by Todd McGowan in Emancipation After Hegel is that the end of history signifies the epoch (modernity) in which no authority is thought to be beyond contradiction. It was foreshadowed by the death of Christ (which gave us the knowledge that even God is not beyond contradiction) but has now become concrete in modernity. Politics is no longer a game of trying to define freedom, but simply the question of what system fits best to our freedom. This is the end of history because, after the universality of contradiction is revealed, no great revelation is left in store for humanity. Fukuyama’s definition and Thorpe’s subverted version, basically that the malaise of (neo)liberal capitalism is unsurmountable and no struggle will overthrow it, runs counter to Hegel’s concept (while still being an extremely theoretically useful reading, mind you) because Hegel did not envision this or that particular society as the ideal form of the end of history, nor did he believe in the end of political struggle (this is a massive supporter of the French revolution we’re talking about here). Furthermore, Hegel’s concept is deduced; he never declares the end of history as an original idea of some kind, adding a concept to the world to help it make sense (he did not do philosophy in the style of Deleuze and Guattari). Rather than bring history to an end, the point is to recognize that it’s over and none of us will ever overcome contradiction. That’s what Atwood shows us by repeating the failure of Crake, both in his design of the Crakers and in his flood/plague: it shakes us out of the silent complicity that we share with Snowman, the silent complicity that is the belief in Crake’s (or any authority’s) infinite perfect power. This is the constant turn that psychoanalysis and Hegel’s philosophy undertake: every apparent substance is also subject, and every master is him/herself already castrated (when the male gaze of mastery looks at you, the subject behind it is already castrated). Ryan Engley remarked somewhere in an episode of Why Theory that “We do power a great favor if we assume it to be undivided,” I’m going to contend that Atwood’s novel works to shake us out of that tacit, yet strong, conviction. 

I would like to use a lot of stuff we went over in class as part of my lit review, some of these deal with Oryx and Crake directly and some with the Anthropocene novel in general (I would like to tackle both in my final paper):

Bracke, Astrid. “The Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, edited by John Parham, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 88–101.

Ciobanu, Calina. “Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Minnesota Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2014, pp. 153–62, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/563078.

Canavan, Gerry. “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.” American Literature, vol. 93, no. 2, 2021, pp. 255–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003582.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 197–222. doi:10.1086/596640.

Dudley, Jack. “Beckett, Atwood, and Postapocalyptic Tragicomedy.” Novel, vol. 54, no. 1, May 2021, pp. 104–19, https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8868833.

Ghosh, Amitav, et al. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, pp.1-33.

LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.” Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, Penn State University Press, 2017, pp. 220–238.

____________________________________________________________________

Now, some new sources gleaned from Hunter Library and JSTOR:

de Freitas Massuno, Tatiana. “The Wish to Stop Time: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Big History, vol. 4, no. 1, 2020, pp. 13–20, https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v4i1.4170.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Religions of Dystopia.” Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, Verso, 2024, pp. 181-186.

SNYDER, KATHERINE V. “‘TIME TO GO’: THE POST-APOCALYPTIC AND THE POST-TRAUMATIC IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S ‘ORYX AND CRAKE.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 43, no. 4, 2011, pp. 470–89, https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2011.0057.

Thorpe, Charles. “Postmodern Neo-Romanticism and The End of History in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 103, no. 2, 2020, pp. 216–42. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.103.2.0216. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.

Some of my own research now:

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 1–64.

Galloway, Alexander R. “Digital Hall of Fame: The Quilting Point.” Culture & Communication, 18 Apr. 2021, cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/digital-hall-of-fame-the-quilting-point.

Hulley, Kathleen. “Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen: The Feminine Voice.” Canadian Literature, no. 164, 2000, pp. 73–78.

Howling With The Wolves

In the first half of Weather, we saw Sylvia losing hope but this process wasn’t completed until around part 4, when she abandons the podcast and starts to research escape plans; his choice is also inseparable from the implied election of Donald Trump in the novel, which she says has “swept away” years of work (140). The nihilistic outcome of Sylvia’s proximity to climate science seems to show that the yoga teacher’s impulse is correct, the only way to live in the modern world is to ascend to higher forms of consciousness and leave the objective world behind. In the juxtaposition between these two women, we can see Lizzie torn between two theoretical frameworks: the western Buddhist spiritualism that asks one to denounce all desire and turn away from the world, and the ivory tower climate prophet nihilism, which is caused by being the only one “woke” to the facts and having to watch organized society send itself to hell because they won’t listen to you. On closer inspection, though, these positions are extremely similar. They both entail hiding from the world and miss how the subject is always already a part of it. Nobody has any ability to speak about the world as if they’re not involved, seeing as we’ve all participated in it and are implicated in its workings in many ways, no matter how small. Even us as students in a classroom take elevators, print papers, use electricity and so on. However, our involvement doesn’t mean we are unable to criticize capitalism. (As in the statement, “Well you’re not doing anything so what are you complaining about?”) Instead, the opposite is true. When we understand and announce that we belong to the collective and that we are not too pure, enlightened, and detached to hang with the rest, that is itself the initial political act.

Each of Lizzie’s mentors asks something of individuals: Sylvia asks them to accept the knowledge that will fix everything (she should’ve taken notes from Freud’s claim that “knowledge doesn’t cure the symptom”), the yoga teacher asks them to open up their latent consciousness. (The failure to do which is the cause of their unhappiness, not any kind of material or personal struggle!) In neither case is the possibility of changing the structure of society itself laid down, and I’m sad to say that Weather as a whole never reaches that level.

Each of Lizzie’s love interests pulls her in a different political direction: Ben works to foster a comforting and loving home life whereas Will stands in for an exciting life of transience and unpredictability. Will represents the quote (all the more profitable given the temperature reference) that Mark Fisher claims is paradigmatic for modern capitalist subjectivity:

“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”

 

Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro’s character on “Heat”)

The novel’s ending shows Lizzie enacting a kind of synthesis between Ben and Will by choosing to continue making a home with Ben, but one built on survivalist principles, or the “doomstead” (194). Lizzie also begins taking care of her physical health more rather than waiting for climate disaster to resolve the entire issue for her, so maybe she hasn’t entirely resigned herself to a canceled future.

Weather’s political blindness is caused by an insistence on remaining separate from the cause of the issue. So long as one tries to preach from above to the rest of society, one guarantees that they will be both hated by those most in danger from the climate crisis and that they will miss the way in which collective responsibility allows for collective action. It’s only because our collective participation has allowed climate change to go on that we can do anything about it; if someone’s response to the climate crisis is to recede into some kind of individual/familial escape plan or to be paralyzed by climate dread, then they must also be assuming that capitalism is some foreign substance in charge of the world independently of us, that no change is possible at the level of how things work. To me, even the idea that it’s too late to properly prevent the crisis is not a good enough excuse. The way we should think of it is: “Yes! We are fucked and it is too late, that’s why we have to do absolutely everything and hold out for a miracle.” But this requires a degree of howling with the wolves. Not only because the “uneducated” and “deplorable” people *must* be mobilized but also because those people are the most susceptible to the kind of politics the left has to offer. It is much easier to bring someone over to leftism if they are already greatly suspicious of the status quo as Trump’s supporters (rightly) are. Democratic voters and politicians, by contrast, tend to blatantly back the status quo, which seems to me to be a totally inert political movement in the present day.

To summarize my confused flow of thoughts: I think Weather is a novel that is greatly damaged by the high-and-mighty liberal position it takes up, and it certainly fails to make the reader conscious of any kind of freedom on their part (something I think Oryx and Crake does very well). I have tried to, with various degrees of clarity, argue that holding yourself above involvement is both what causes the climate dread and disables collective action. Finally, I have tried to draw a parallel between the novel’s politics and the liberal-left political views of modern day America. Much more work is required to clarify my point and make it stick, and I hope to do some of that work on the final project.

What is the relation of time to the experience of freedom in Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake?” How does the novel *INTERNALLY* use disparate time periods (pre-collapse/post-collapse) to alert the reader to a baseline ontological openness? (In other words, to make the point to the reader that even when things seem dire, there is still hope for contingent miracles, because no authority–like Crake or God–is complete unto themselves.)

I understand there’s a huge presupposition within this question–I’m already presupposing that the novel does something with time. First, I would need to prove that it does what I claim then show how it does that.

“The show is about nothing!”

-George Costanza (Seinfeld S4E3, “The Pitch”)

Weather is a strange stream of consciousness style novel that’s split into short scenes. It’s extremely easy to read this novel and to even gloss over a whole page without getting anything because of how quickly it moves. While at first it seemed that there was no common thread between any of the things being discussed (from the mentions of climate change, to the narrator’s knee, to her job at the library and side gig with Sylvia, to her brother’s addiction, to her southeast Asian neighbors), reading part 2 began to make that thread visible. The book begins with a note from a 1640 town meeting in Connecticut that proudly declares humans to be the sole and supreme owners of Earth. Shortly thereafter, it becomes clear that this sense of entitlement is what the novel blames for climate change. On page 84 we see an old email sent out by Sylvia to a listener who asks “How did we end up here?” to which Sylvia sends a quote similar to the one from the preliminary page of the novel, essentially declaring human dominion over the Earth. So, it is because human beings have believed themselves to have a God-given right to exploit the Earth that climate change exists today. The novel can be thought of as an experiment to try to show the disfunctionality of this “given” fact of life. Furthermore, I think it actually implicitly challenges quite a lot of “givens.” The novel lays bare societal disfunction through the predicament of the narrator, Lizzie, who has a degenerating knee she cannot afford to care for and has to pay for stuff with pennies (p.108) but is constantly reproached to meditate or eat healthier by people who seem more enlightened, or like they’ve escaped objective reality. She and her husband are both doing other things than the ones they studied for because their fields aren’t needed in late capitalist production. Lizzie is left with a precarious librarian job (out of which they can kick her out at any moment, and she jokes that they may have already kicked her out and she didn’t notice) and her husband makes games that, we can infer, will not bring in a consistent stream of income. She sees many people come to the library to waste the days away pretending to have a job, because they’ve been kicked out of theirs and are too embarrassed to face their families. Addiction is rampant in the novel, depression and anxiety also seem to be omnipresent among the cast of characters. With the mentions of everything from health problems, drug addiction, poverty, and mental illness, one is left thinking, why are all these people in this predicament and why is there no kind of state or organization helping them? Not only does it seem that this is not usual (the very dry, sardonic way it’s described making this all the more jarring) but there doesn’t seem to be a consistent functioning system that runs itself in the background. Capitalism seems to be holding on by a thread in this novel. And I don’t think it’s possible to read this book the way one can watch the TV show “Shameless” (which also shows mental illness, poverty, and addiction), because that’s one case where it is very easy to blame everything that happens on the mere individuals involved. The political sphere is definitely visible in Weather; things don’t work for its characters because society itself is not in order, not just because they don’t have the right mindset.

To add on to all these failures of the state, the fact of climate change constantly breaks through the gaps of the novel with mentions of a New York City that will soon be unlivably hot, preparations for a trip to Mars, conspiratorial plans to make a survivor colony on Antarctica, etc. Sylvia has been worn down by having to constantly bring the fact of climate change to her mind due to her podcast and Lizzie begins to experience the same after she starts responding to emails for the show. I think the sporadic form of the novel, featuring short scenes of daily life interposed with doom-filled mentions of climate change, shows just how hard it is to constantly think about the climate–to really make it a reality in one’s mind. Furthermore, it reflects the modern human’s relation to it: a burst of doom followed by a very necessary act of forgetting that allows you to go on about your day. I think the fact that the doomed thought is featured in a novel, however, makes it inevitable that you’ll carry it with you to the next part; it makes you see the scenes of the narrator’s child having fun in the context of new data coming in that has climate scientists extremely worried. So every moment of reading is imbued with a little bit of dread, which is not necessarily true of the modern human’s condition (some people do well at ignoring). That’s what makes this novel a bit of an intervention into the reader’s mind. It asks you to carry the knowledge that the structure of society is untenable with you all the time rather than setting it aside periodically.

I would really like to know whether Offill has read Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” because I was constantly reminded of that short text while reading this one. Fisher’s point is that the neoliberal ideology that “There Is No Alternative” to liberal democracy and capitalism has the effect of cancelling the future and making subjects more complicit in the system and far more miserable all at once. Fisher goes on to blame mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, and ADHD on capitalism, and states that the goal of leftist art is to challenge the pervading sense of a cancelled future by showing capitalism’s dysfunctions in everything from ecology to mental health to working conditions. I think this novel is a great example of that and I’m excited to see where it goes from here.