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.
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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.
Laflen, Angela. “‘There’s a Shock in This Seeing’: The Problem of the Image in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Oryx and Crake.’” Amerikastudien, vol. 54, no. 1, 2009, pp. 99–120.
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.
Wheeler, Pat. “‘Another Generation Cometh’: Apocalyptic Endings and New Beginnings in Science Fictional New London(s).” Critical Survey, vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 57–70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42751034. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
Zakiyah, Tasnim. “Storytelling as Environmental Discourse in Oryx and Crake: Climate Change and the Hope for Survival.” Canadian Journal of Language and Literature Studies, vol. 5, no. 5, 2025, p. 1, https://doi.org/10.53103/cjlls.v5i5.226.
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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.
Tolan, Fiona. “The Psychoanalytic Theme in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: A Response to Burkhard Niederhoff.” Connotations, vol. 19, no. 1-3, 2009/10, pp. 92–106.
Wright, Colin. “Lacan on Trauma and Causality: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Post-Traumatic Stress/Growth.” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 42, no. 2, 2021, pp. 235–244. Springer, doi:10.1007/s10912-020-09622-w.
Žižek, Slavoj. “What Lies Ahead?” Jacobin, 17 Jan. 2023, jacobin.com/2023/01/slavoj-zizek-time-future-history-catastrophe-emancipation.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006. Chapter 2, titled “Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology.”
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The first search terms I used in the Hunter Library were “Oryx and Crake, time, temporality,” and this gave me quite literally nothing. After switching to “Oryx and crake, time, utopia,” I saw a few more results. I repeated many similar searches also using the terms “freedom, speculative fiction, dystopia,” interchangeably and was able to get more sources that seemed relevant. Sometimes, the library sent me to JSTOR where I would save the source and get the ready-made MLA citation. All mistakes in citation will be fixed by the final paper.
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One can see I have added a lot of theoretical texts and seemingly unrelated sources that stray both from the text of Oryx and from my research question. This is because I have mistakenly made the decision to tie my initial blog post on Oryx that focused on Atwood’s use of/treatment of psychoanalytic themes and concepts to my newer research question on the relation of the novel’s form to the reader’s experience of freedom–a mistake that I will unfortunately be carrying through with.
From Hegel’s dialectic of freedom and necessity, to Freud’s “Nachträglichkeit,” to Lacan’s “point de capiton,” to the second chapter of Zizek’s “The Parallax View” where these concepts can be seen in play simultaneously, to the endlessly discussed concepts of the “End of History,” “Utopia,” “dystopia,” and “cancelled futures,” I will hope to use this novel to tie the micro-level of subjective trauma to the macro-level of political freedom. The thesis (theses?) is, as of this moment, that Oryx’s relation to trauma is a mirror of the novel’s relation to ontological openness and that Snowman is a Zizekian representative of faith and freedom who roams a totally desolate landscape where, probably, he is doomed and nothing at all remains for him, but he continues impossibly and through sheer faith. I may also speak a little bit about the novel’s biblical allusions and the Hegelian notion of the “monstrous cleavage” of Christ on the cross along with the previous line of thinking.
The Professor, who is now thinking, “This is a lot, will he really be able to write only ten to twelve pages on this?” will either be met with an excessively dense twelve-page paper or a decent and conservative twelve-page paper supplemented with a five to ten page “Appendix” following the works cited page that he won’t have to read or grade me on, but that the circumstances force me to include. Apologies in advance.
