Research Question: How does Oryx and Crake rework the Gothic novel, Frankenstein, to reflect a more modern crisis of scientific ethics and ecological responsibility?

Bourret, R., Martinez, E., Vialla, F. et al. Human–animal chimeras: ethical issues about farming chimeric animals bearing human organs. Stem Cell Res Ther 7, 87 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13287-016-0345-9

Cooper, Isabella D et al. “Bio-Hacking Better Health-Leveraging Metabolic Biochemistry to Maximise Healthspan.” Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) vol. 12,9 1749. 11 Sep. 2023, doi:10.3390/antiox12091749

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

Gibert, Teresa. ‘The Monster in the Mirror: Margaret Atwood’s Retelling of the Frankenstein Myth.’ Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. Ed. Miriam Borham. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018. pp. 33-49 

Steendam, Tom Van.‘Paratextuality and Parody in a Post-cataclysmic Wasteland: Margaret Atwood‘s Oryx and Crake.’ Exlibrisgroup, Ghent University Library, 2010.

I enjoyed beginning the research process for this final project. I would say it was a bit difficult to narrow down what I wanted to focus on when answering this question. I found only two sources which directly related to my research question. They both analyzed the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, one only briefly comparing them. Being that Frankenstein is widely considered to be the first science fiction novel, it is fitting to say that it would have some sort of influence towards the more recent novel, however it is something that has not been expanded upon. For my research I focused on the modern ethics and responsibility part of my question. I think it was important to first become familiar with what exactly are the concerns in the modern scientific field, especially what was a concern when Oryx and Crake was written. I have much more experience when searching for scientific articles so it was hard for me not to go down that rabbit hole, but the PubMed database on the National Library of Medicine website is one of my go-to sites for biomedical literature, which I took my other two sources from. My fifth source is one from the list of already provided sources, but I found it could work well to begin to answer my question. I am still not sure how to bring everything together but beginning this research has made me a little more confident on comparing the two novels and on finding similarities.

As I read this book more, I began to compare Snowman (Jimmy) with Lizzie. Before, I didn’t think of such a thing since it felt like forever ago we read Oryx and Crake. However, once reading more on her jokes and even how she would also state many, many facts that she learned from the library, it slowly reminded me of Snowman now. “Scientists say that the theory of everything is a technical expression, not a metaphysical one.” (Offill, 169) Will even said, “How do you know all this?” (Offill, 170), and Lizzie’s response was simple, “I’m a fucking Librarian” (Offill, 170). Reminded me of how Jimmy would say related facts or random facts to himself, but in this case, Lizzie does know where she gets her information, and for Snowman, he had forgotten because later on, going to work with Crake, and then the start of the apocalypse, and taking care of the crackers. They both also have the same type of humor. Lizzie made me chuckle time to time with her comments, just like Snowman. They are both so related, and yet both of their stories are very different from each other. Both worlds are different in what’s going on. In Oryx and Crake, the focus is on the development of science in relation to living creatures and new humans, while in Weather, we get to see a bit on the topic of people saying that climate change is happening right now, but most people ignore that. In my opinion, it focuses more on the politics of the president, which is so important and one of the things that will affect our future, like climate change. Now, in the story “Weather,” we don’t see who is trying to be president, but we see how it affects Lizzie’s day in a conversation, which I found very interesting. They briefly talked about the election and after Ben, then said, “Should we get a gun?” (Offill,113). Lizzie then mentions that “It was the same after 9/11. There was that hum in the air” (Offill,113). I found it really interesting because I don’t think I have read anything of politics and talk about it. For Oryx and Crake, we only know how everything is socially and how the financial class is (from my memory). That said, I believe that Lizzie and Snowman would be great friends, maybe, since Snowman and Lizzie deal with a lot of different things in their world, and how they are trying to deal with them.

Franks, Nadia-Terese Laguna. “‘Belief Rather Than a Memory’: The Relationship Between

Gender and Trauma in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” C21 Literature, vol. 11, no.

1, 2024, p. Volume 11 • Issue 1 • 2024 • Spring-Summer 2024,

https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.8735.

Xinzhu, Zhu. “The Ethics of Technology: Reflection on Gendered Science in Oryx and Crake.”

Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 14, no. 5SI, 2022, p. 793.

Bergthaller, Hannes. “Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the Problem of

Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” English

Studies, vol. 91, no. 7, 2010, pp. 728–43,

https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2010.518042. 

Martín, Javier. “Dystopia, Feminism and Phallogocentrism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and

Crake.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, pp. 174–81,

https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0015. 

Siemann, Catherine. “Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret

Atwood.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 27, no. 1 (95), International Association

for the Fantastic in the Arts, 2016, pp. 170–72.

I mostly used Hunter One Search to find the sources for my research question mainly because on everything else I looked on I couldn’t find anything. I don’t even really think the sources I found are going to be that useful for my research paper, so I may just entirely change my question since I’m having a difficult time finding anything to use as evidence. I used key words like masculinity and suppression but I got nothing from those so I had to go more broad and use the word gender which gave me a majority of the sources in the bibliography. I only really skimmed the abstracts so I’m not sure they’re even really all that good.

Question: How does Weather portray the emotional and psychological labor of caring for other people and for the world as a gendered burden, and does Offill’s fragmented way of writing make that burden more visible or hide it?

work cited

• Murray, Jessica. “Women Navigating the Climate Catastrophe: Challenging Anthropocentrism in Selected Fiction.” Journal of Literary Studies 37.3 (2021): 15-33.
• De Cristofaro, Diletta. “‘How Do You Sleep at Night Knowing All This?’: Climate Breakdown, Sleep, and Extractive Capitalism in Contemporary Literature and Culture.” Textual Practice, vol. 38, no. 10, 2024, pp. 1601–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2265887.
• PEINADO-ABARRIO, R. U. B. É. N. ““FRAGMENTED AND BEWILDERING:” THE NEW RISK SOCIETY IN JENNY OFFILL’S WEATHER.”
• Bobis, Anne. “An Unfaithful Feminist: Neoliberal Feminism, Identity, and Postmodernism in Jenny Offill’s Dept. Of Speculation.” (2023).
• Declercq, Edith. Beyond “the Obligatory Note of Hope”: Buddhism, Ecology, and Affect in the Everyday Anthropocene Novel. Diss. Ghent University, 2021.
• Wharton, Amy S. “The Sociology of Emotional Labor.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 35, 2009, pp. 147–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800073. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
  At first, searching for peer-reviewed journals for my research question was honestly pretty hard and frustrating. I started with Hunter Libraries, but the keywords I thought would work, like “emotional labor,” “psychological labor,” “fragmentation in Weather,” and “gendered burden,” didn’t give me many useful results. Because of that, I tried other places. Google Scholar gave me more articles to look through, but I still had to be careful since not everything on there is actually peer-reviewed. I did manage to find a couple of good sources that were. I also checked JSTOR and ended up finding one more article that was helpful. Overall, the process took a lot of trial and error with different keywords and search combinations, but it helped me understand how to adjust my searches and where to look when one database didn’t give me enough results. I still feel like I have more research to do, to find better sources and fine tune my question.

Soni, Amit Kumar. “Depiction of ‘Slow Violence’ in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” International Education & Research Journal (IERJ), vol. 8, no. 7, July 2022, pp. 48–50. IERJ, ierj.in/journal/index.php/ierj/article/view/2872.

Anand, Divya. “Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 21–44.

Anand, Divya. “Locating the Politics of the Environment and the Exploited in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Essays in Ecocriticism, edited by Nirmal Selvamony and Rayson K. Alex, OSLE-India / Sarup & Sons, 2007, pp. 156–171.

Jones, Brandon. “A Postcolonial Utopia for the Anthropocene: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Climate-Induced Migration.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 64, no. 4, Winter 2018, pp. 639–658. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.2018.0047.

Weik, Alexa. “The Home, the Tide, and the World: Eco-Cosmopolitan Encounters in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2006, pp. 120–142.

For my research, I focused on finding peer – reviewed scholarly articles about The Hungry Tide that connect the environmental crisis with politics and history in the Sundarbans. I mainly used Google Scholar because the Hunter library one search was confusing for me and wasn’t giving me any good articles at first. On Google Scholar I tried combinations of key words like “The Hungry Tide slow violence,” “Amitav Ghosh postcolonial ecocriticism,” “Sundarbans environmental justice,” “The Hungry Tide climate change,” and “The Hungry Tide political violence Morichjhapi.” From those results, I chose sources that directly discussed ideas related to my research question, such as slow violence, conservation politics, refugee displacement, ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene. For the Brandon Jones article, I used the Project MUSE link provided on commons, through Hunter’s library proxy to get the whole article. Overall, I prioritized sources that analyze The Hungry Tide and link environmental crises with state power, refugees, and colonial/postcolonial history, since that’s what my research question is really about.