Works Cited

Giovannelli, Laura. “Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids. Tracing the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Between, vol. 12, no. 24, 2022, pp. 291-311. Hunter OneSearch, https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/5127.

In her essay, Giovannelli evaluates the Crakers’ anthropological and zoological dimensions through post-humanist and trans-humanist lens. She argues that Crake’s engineering of these humanoids and their development of culture represents the failure to remove humanity via science. Humanity’s subsequent kinship with the pigoons in MaddAddam contradicts earlier critics’ demarcation between humans and nature (“multispecies”), placing the Crakers in the liminal space in between, although leaning more towards “the human” rather than “the posthuman”, thereby providing a clear identity between human and animal. 

Heise, Ursula K. “The Android and the Animal.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, 2010, pp. 503-510. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614291. 

Heise’s essay argues that recent science fiction’s assessment of the boundary between the android and the animal reaffirms humanist thought, despite technology and nature in science fiction existing in a posthumanist world. In Oryx and Crake, in particular, there is a tendency to return to the human essence despite the science that attempts to remove it. This essay provides a litany of science fiction novels exhibiting the persistence of humanism within a posthumanist world. 

Kozioł, Sławomir. “From Sausages to Hoplites of Ham and Beyond: The Status of Genetically Modified Pigs in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, vol. 54, no. 3, 2018 Summer, pp. 261-295. Modern Language Association, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=4d1eded4-edae-3f55-b2c0-1d0e0ba9082a.

The genetic engineering on which Kozioł focuses in this paper are the pigoons instead of the Crakers and argues that their subordination to humans (“the exploitable other”), despite sharing genes and exhibiting rational agency, upholds human exceptionalism and is unavoidable according to human history. Kozioł invokes both historical methodologies and social contract theory to examine the hypocrisy of human exceptionalism and identify weaknesses of posthumanism in the MaddAddam trilogy. 

Schmeink, Lars. “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal.” Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 71-118. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33cv.6.

In his research, Schmeink compares how the MaddAddam trilogy and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl depict how hypercapitalism and environmental collapse challenge humanness. He questions human authority by focusing on the harmony between genetically-engineered species and nature, with the former still being able to achieve traits of “the human”. Rather than calculating how all other beings fit into “the human”– a humanist perspective–, he extends this reckoning of where humans fit among other intelligent life to the human. 

Schmeink, Lars. “Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity.” Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 18-70. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33cv.5. 

Schmeink traces the origins and development of science fiction through historicist methods. He also gives extensive explanations of humanism and anti-humanism which are useful in explaining post-humanist theory. 

Yoo, Jihun. “Transhumanist Impulse, Utopian Vision, and Reversing Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 114, no. 4, 2019, pp. 662-681. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.114.4.0662. 

Yoo identifies Oryx and Crake and Octavia Butler’s Dawn as novels reflecting human anxieties about scientific and technological progress and the transhumanist impulse and utopian vision that originates from such progress. He focuses on the tension between the attempts at human perfection and utopia through technology and its devastating ramifications such as eugenics. Yoo resolves that Oryx and Crake pushes the idea that communities based on kinship and not utopian visions are what define post-apocalyptic, post-human futures. 

Research Question: How does Margret Atwood and Jenny Offill use fragmented temporal structures to convey human anxiety and a sense of responsibility in the Anthropocene?

(Some of these sources are subject to change but I feel overall confident with my first three sources)

• 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.

Tatiana, the author of this article, employs in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake to use fragmented temporal structures to embody the disorienting experience of human anxiety amid ecological catastrophe and the Anthropocene’s challenge. Tatiana mentions the novel juxtaposes Snowman’s fractured, liminal present that is marked by the “zero hour”, a suspended time that denotes both a beginning and an end. It jumps between moments played as flashbacks to a human altered past setting a destabilized linear progression. Atwood’s narrative disrupts chronological time to reflect the collapse of the human centered historical narrative. I can correlate this into my research paper to argue Snowman’s fragmented memories and the return to the “zero hour” amplify the anxiety and temporal dislocation and the ethical dilemma of balancing human needs with long term environmental health in a post apocalyptic world where these boundaries begin to blur.

• 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.

Kathrine V. Snyder’s analysis in Margret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake views the novel through the lens of trauma theory which emphasizes the fragmented, doubled temporality that mirrors Snowman’s disrupted consciousness. Snyder argues Atwood’s narrative structure alternates between a post apocalyptic present and a pre-apocalyptic past which aligns with trauma characteristics of temporal delay and the interplay of remembering and forgetting. This form of fragmentation embodies Snowman perfectly and mimics how humanity views the ecological devastation and ethical responsibility in the Anthropocene. Where the mass of individuals tend to be aware of the ongoing ecological crisis but because of the anxiety of the scale of the mass of the problem makes us want to forget about it and push it away into the back of our mind. Snyder highlights how Snowman is portrayed both as a witness to and survivor of personal grief that is connected to the huge loss of humanity. The temporal disruptions, such as memory blanks and repeated traumatic scenes, evoke the ethical complexity of living with the consequences of human-made apocalypse

• Kruger, Katherine. “Aging through Precarious Time: Maintenance and Milling in The Cost of Living and Weather.” Poetics Today, vol. 44, no. 1–2, 2023, pp. 89–110, https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342099.

Kahtrine Kruger explores how Deborah Levy’s The cost of living and Jenny Offill’s Weather uses fragmented narrative temporalities to represent midlife aging amid an environmental crisis and an unstable economic state. Kruger uses the terms “Maintenance” and “Milling” to represent these temporal structures, they disrupt traditional progress driven narratives comparing it to structures such as the Künstlerroman structure. Kruger emphasizes the endurance through repetitive care and aimless waiting as a response to uncertain futures shaped by unstable economic status and climate anxiety. Kruger connects these forms to broader feminist and critical theories on time, care, and labor.

• Caracciolo, Marco. “Short Forms for Eco-Anxiety: Cognitive Realism in Climate Fiction.” Theory Now (Online), vol. 8, no. 2, 2025, pp. 10–29, https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v8i2.30745.

Marco Caracciolo offers a detailed exploration of how fragmented temporal structures in contemporary climate fiction represent the embodiment of the pervasive human anxiety and sense of responsibility characteristic of the Anthropocene. Caracciolo argues that Offill’s narrative structure of short fragmented paragraphs and aphoristic statements mirror the attention span induced by online media and the influx of overwhelming climate related information. This fragmentation effectively conveys the phenomenology of ecological anxiety. Offill uses the present tense narration and disjointed sentence structure to reflect the disoriented mental state as she juggles with parenthood, being there for her brother, and the broader ecological crisis, emphasizing the intimate entanglement of individual responsibility with planetary scale threats

• Sylvia Mayer. “Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Jenny Offill’s Weather.” Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2025, https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.227.

Sylvia Mayer argues that Offill’s novel, through disjointed diary-like entries, vividly convey the pervasive climate anxiety experienced by individuals immersed in the present moment of an escalating ecological crisis. This narrative form of fragmentation mirrors the mental and emotional confusion and distraught caused by climate change. Mayer highlights how Offill’s portrayal moves beyond despair by fostering a form of “angry optimism” encouraging a relational ethic grounded in solidarity and collective responsibility.

Final Project – Annotated Bibliography

Updated Research Question:

How do Oryx and Crake and The Hungry Tide show what happens when characters leave a controlled, Western-style world and enter environments where nature is stronger, unpredictable, and makes them feel like outsiders?

I changed my question after my professor’s comment. Now it is more focused and clearer. Both novels show people who step into places where nature is not controlled or protected. When this happens, the characters feel unsure, uncomfortable, and sometimes lost inside themselves. I want to explore how these environments change the characters and make them feel like they don’t fully belong.

Annotated Bibliography

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Nixon writes about how environmental problems harm people slowly, especially those who live in vulnerable places. This helps me see the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide as a place where nature is powerful and dangerous, not something you can easily understand or control. His ideas help me explain why characters like Piya, who comes from a scientific Western world, feel unsure and like outsiders when they enter a space shaped by tides, storms, and long histories they do not know. Nixon gives me language to talk about displacement and the feeling of being “out of place.”

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Ecocriticism and the Global South.” ISLE, 2012.

DeLoughrey shows how land, climate, and culture shape identity. This is helpful because The Hungry Tide is full of these connections especially the relationship between people and the water. When Piya enters this world, she observes it scientifically, but she cannot fully understand it the way Fokir does. This article helps me explain how entering a new environment can make someone feel small or disconnected, even if they are trying to learn. It supports my idea that nature can push someone outside of their comfort zone.

Canavan, Gerry. “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Utopia in Oryx and Crake.” Utopian Studies, 2013.

Canavan explains how Atwood creates a world where humans no longer control nature, and this connects strongly with Snowman’s loneliness. He becomes an outsider not just socially, but emotionally and physically. The new world feels strange to him because it does not match the world, he grew up in. Canavan helps me understand that this feeling is not only personal it is also ecological. Everything around Snowman reminds him that he does not belong anymore. This helps my argument because it shows nature making a character feel separate from the world.

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2010.

This book talks about how history, culture, and the environment shape the way people understand a place. In both novels, the environment is connected to deeper political histories. This helps me compare the two books: The Hungry Tide deals with real communities in a place shaped by storms and colonialism, and Oryx and Crake imagines a world destroyed by human control. This source helps me explain how characters can feel like outsiders when they enter environments with histories or memories they do not share. It helps me see the emotional distance between characters and the natural spaces they move through.

Siemann, Catherine. “Bodies and Borders in Oryx and Crake.” Mosaic, 2011.

Siemann shows how Snowman’s body reacts to the new world his hunger, weakness, and pain. This makes his outsider feeling even stronger. His body does not fit the environment anymore, and he has to constantly adjust just to survive. This article helps me argue that the outsider feeling is not only in the mind but also in the body. When the natural world changes, the characters feel it physically. This supports my idea that nature can transform people and make them feel unfamiliar even to themselves.

Research Process:

For this project, I went on the Hunter College Library website and searched in JSTOR and MLA International Bibliography. I typed simple words like “nature,” “identity,” “environment,” “outsider,” “The Hungry Tide,” and “Oryx and Crake.” I read through different articles and picked the ones that made the most sense to me and connected to how environment changes characters. I chose these five sources because they helped me understand how people react when they enter an unfamiliar natural world. These sources support my new research question and help me keep my argument clear and focused.

New MLA Format:

Annotated Bibliography

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Nixon writes about how environmental problems harm people slowly, especially those who live in vulnerable places. This helps me see the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide as a place where nature is powerful and dangerous, not something you can easily understand or control. His ideas help me explain why characters like Piya, who comes from a scientific Western world, feel unsure and like outsiders when they enter a space shaped by tides, storms, and long histories they do not know. Nixon gives me language to talk about displacement and the feeling of being “out of place.”

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Ecocriticism and the Global South.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 19, no. 3, 2012, pp. 331–347.

DeLoughrey shows how land, climate, and culture shape identity. This is helpful because The Hungry Tide is full of these connections especially the relationship between people and the water. When Piya enters this world, she observes it scientifically, but she cannot fully understand it the way Fokir does. This article helps me explain how entering a new environment can make someone feel small or disconnected, even if they are trying to learn. It supports my idea that nature can push someone outside of their comfort zone.

Canavan, Gerry. “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Utopia in Oryx and Crake.” Utopian Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, 2013, pp. 142–163.

Canavan explains how Atwood creates a world where humans no longer control nature, and this connects strongly with Snowman’s loneliness. He becomes an outsider not just socially but emotionally and physically. The new world feels strange to him because it does not match the world he grew up in. Canavan helps me understand that this feeling is not only personal it is also ecological. Everything around Snowman reminds him that he does not belong anymore. This helps my argument because it shows nature making a character feel separate from the world.

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010.

This book talks about how history, culture, and the environment shape the way people understand a place. In both novels, the environment is connected to deeper political histories. This helps me compare the two books:

– The Hungry Tide deals with real communities in a place shaped by storms and colonialism.

– Oryx and Crake imagines a world destroyed by human control.

This source helps me explain how characters can feel like outsiders when they enter environments with histories or memories they do not share. It helps me see the emotional distance between characters and the natural spaces they move through.

Siemann, Catherine. “Bodies and Borders in Oryx and Crake.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 44, no. 4, 2011, pp. 139–154.

Siemann shows how Snowman’s body reacts to the new world his hunger, weakness, and pain. This makes his outsider feeling even stronger. His body does not fit the environment anymore, and he has to constantly adjust just to survive. This article helps me argue that the outsider feeling is not only in the mind but also in the body. When the natural world changes, the characters feel it physically. This supports my idea that nature can transform people and make them feel unfamiliar even to themselves.

Research Process:

For this project, I went on the Hunter College Library website and searched in JSTOR and MLA International Bibliography. I typed simple words like “nature,” “identity,” “environment,” “outsider,” “The Hungry Tide,” and “Oryx and Crake.” I read through different articles and picked the ones that made the most sense to me and connected to how environment changes characters. I chose these five sources because they helped me understand how people react when they enter an unfamiliar natural world. These sources support my new research question and help me keep my argument clear and focused.

(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.