Research question: How does Atwood use the division of the “word” people and the “number” people to comment on the devaluation of the humanities and lack of morals in a science dominated society

1. Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (Hulan, Renée. “Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity by Lorraine York (Review).” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 3, 2015, pp. 270–71.) https://cuny-hc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CUNY_HC/9p6vcd/cdi_projectmuse_journals_596466_S1712527815300884

2. Authenticity and Atwood’s ‘Scientific Turn (Chilton, Myles. “Authenticity and Atwood’s ‘Scientific Turn.” Humanities, vol. 11, no. 6, 2022, p. 134, https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060134.) https://cuny-hc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CUNY_HC/9p6vcd/cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_2d40491d2c3a4a24aae525101fd1d389

3. Words vs Numbers (Mora-Gonzalez, Melissa. “Words vs. Numbers: A Review of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Berkeley Fiction Review, 1 Mar. 2023) https://berkeleyfictionreview.org/2023/03/01/margaret-atwoods-oryx-and-crake-a-review/

4.13 Vulnerability as duality in speculative fiction  (Dinis, Eva. “Vulnerability as Duality in Speculative Fiction.” Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre, edited by Anneleen Masschelein et al., UCL Press, 2021, pp. 223–37. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nnwhjt.17) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nnwhjt.17

5. Oryx Crake and Themes (​Winner, Kathryn. “Oryx and Crake Themes: History, Language & the Humanities.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 17 Jun 2015. Web. 26 Nov 2025.) https://www.litcharts.com/lit/oryx-and-crake/themes/history-language-the-humanities#:~:text=While%20Jimmy%20is%20literally%20one,to%20the%20problem%20of%20survival.

In order to find these sources, I used search engines like Google, hunter one search and jstor. I attempted the MLA site but like in the library nothing popped up. I searched “Atwood humanities” “oryx and crake humanites” and  “oryx and crake number vs words”. I will continue to look for more sites and resources but for now I feel like Google and the hunter one search website are more reliable in my opinion.

Essay Question: How does Jenny Offill use literary elements, specifically her fragmented style of writing and her use of humor in her novel Weather, to express and manage anxieties related to climate change, culture, and everyday life? 

Sources: Offill, Jenny. Weather. Vintage, 2021 

1.Mayer, Sylvia. “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://jaaas.eu/jaaas/article/view/227/237

2.Peinado-Abarrio, Rubén. “‘Fragmented and Bewildering:’ The New Risk Society in Jenny Offill’s Weather.” Revista De Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, Dec. 2022, pp. 1–23, https://institucional.us.es/revistas/estudios/26/peinado-abarrio.pdf

3.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://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2265887#abstract

4.Garner, Dwight. “In Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather,’ Paranoia Is Delivered with Humor (Published 2020).” New York Times, 31 Jan. 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/books/review-weather-jenny-offill.html

5.Dean, Michelle. “A Fragmented Novel for the End of the World.” The New Republic, 2 Apr. 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/156865/jenny-offill-novel-weather-book-review-end-world

In order to find these sources, I used searches such as “Jenny Offill’s Weather and climate change” and “Jenny Offill’s Weather and anxiety” and “Jenny Offill’s Weather and fragmented writing style” and finally “Jenny Offill’s Weather and using humor to cope with anxiety.” For this research I used Hunter College Libraries OneSearch, where I was able to find two different sources, both of which are peer reviewed. From one of them I found another source using the work cited page. I used Google to find my last two sources, as I couldn’t find much about Weather on OneSearch. As I continue to look for sources, I plan to use other databases to expand my research.

Research Question: How does Atwood use the past and future to show the effects of human actions on the environment in Oryx and Crake, and what does this show about the disconnect between imagined ideal futures and actual ecological consequences?

Botting, Fred. “‘Dead Peasants’: Ethics of Extinction in Oryx and Crake.” Gothic Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, 2025, pp. 142–57.

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.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 23, no. 2, 2012, pp. 138–59.

Kabak, Murat. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as a Critique of Technological Utopianism.” English Studies at NBU, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 37–50.

Mohr, Dunja M. “Eco-Dystopia and Biotechnology: Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood(2009), and MaddAddam (2013).” Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics, New Tendencies and Model Interpretations, 2015, pp. 283–302.

Tasnim, Zakiyah. “Storytelling as Environmental Discourse in Oryx and Crake: Climate Change and the Hope for Survival.” Canadian Journal of Language and Literature Studies 5.5 (2025): 1-14.

I mainly used google scholars for my simple bibliography because it was easier to navigate and gave me a larger option of sources to choose from. I found that JSTOR articles were outdated and did not address the specific ideas in Oryx and Crake that I wanted to discuss in my essay. I searched for key words such as dystopia/utopia, climate neglect, and climate change in Oryx and Crake. I also tried to find a critique on my research question that I could use instead of only finding articles that support my ideas, but this was hard to come by as my research question doesn’t really follow an argument that is widely debated. However, I did find many articles that support my ideas but say certain things that I would not agree with in regards to the novel. 

Lizzie is basically running an emotional daycare for her entire life. She technically gets paid to work at the library, but not for the part she actually spends most of her energy on which is running an emotional support hotline for the entire planet. Her official job is helping patrons, shelving books, answering normal questions. Her unofficial job is everything else: calming anxious strangers emailing about climate collapse, listening to Sylvia’s listeners, soothing her brother, watching her son, managing her husband’s absent-mindedness, and taking care of the dog that keeps rolling in pink soap. It’s like she accidentally became the emotional manager of her whole ecosystem, and somehow she’s the only one who didn’t get the memo.

Offill never says Lizzie inherited caregiving, but everything about the way Lizzie moves through the world suggests it. She comforts her brother. She worries about her son’s school life. She listens carefully to Sylvia’s anxious listeners. She absorbs tension the way some people absorb sunlight. She just takes responsibility for everyone, as if the alternative would be leaving the world slightly less cared for. But the cost of all this is that Lizzie rarely names her own fear. She thinks about climate anxiety, she reads about disaster preparedness, she scrolls through news that leaves her uneasy. However she rarely says any of it out loud. She doesn’t have a space where she can unburden herself the way others unburden themselves onto her. The support she provides so naturally isn’t mirrored back at her.

Offill deepens this with one of the novel’s small but sharp images: the deer. Lizzie wonders why people don’t farm them, and the explanation is simple: they panic when confined (pg. 193). She panics inside the invisible walls built around her: mother, helper, fixer, the one-who-will-handle-it. These roles seem gentle, even admirable from the outside, but from Lizzie’s view, they’re tight. There’s not much room to breathe.

And yet, what makes Lizzie so human is that her caretaking is also the thing that keeps her afloat. In a world full of disappearing birds, rising heat, and endless warnings about what’s coming, her tiny gestures become acts of quiet resistance. Washing soap off the dog. Checking on her brother. Trying to teach her son softness in a world that’s getting harder. These things don’t fix anything on a grand scale, but they tether her to the people she loves. They remind her that not everything is falling apart, not all at once, not everywhere. Offill seems to suggest that surviving the Anthropocene is as much emotional work as it is physical. Lizzie’s care isolates her at times; it exhausts her; it boxes her in. But it also gives her life shape and meaning. It is the thing that stretches her thin and the thing that keeps her from collapsing entirely. And maybe that’s the truth the novel leaves us with:
love asks a lot. Sometimes too much. But somehow, it still becomes the reason we keep going.

I think Lizzie doesn’t survive the world by solving it. And in that, Offill gives us a portrait of a woman whose quiet labor becomes its own form of hope. Not a loud or heroic hope, but the kind that exists in small gestures, soft routines, and the stubborn choice to tend to what’s in front of you. Because even in a collapsing world, care is still a way of saying:
I’m here. You’re here.
And that’s enough to keep going.

Research Question:

How do Oryx and Crake and The Hungry Tide show that nature can make people feel like outsiders in their own world?

For my final project, I want to look at how nature in both books makes people feel different or “outside” of the world around them. In both novels, the characters are changed by the environment, and this makes them feel alone or like they don’t fully belong. This is something I understand and can explain in simple ways.

Simple Bibliography (MLA)

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

This book talks about people who are pushed aside because of the environment and government. It helps me understand the outsider feeling in The Hungry Tide.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Ecocriticism and the Global South.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2012.

This article explains how nature and climate can make people feel outside of society. It connects well with Piya and Fokir.

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

This source helps me understand the new world in Atwood’s novel and why Snowman feels so alone.

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

This book shows how history, culture, and nature make people feel separated or different. It fits both novels.

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

This article explains how the body and the natural world shape how characters feel about themselves and why they feel like outsiders.

Research Process (very simple, your voice)

For my research, I used the Hunter College Library. I searched in JSTOR and MLA International Bibliography. I typed simple words like “nature,” “outsider,” “Oryx and Crake,” and “The Hungry Tide.” I chose these five sources because they were the easiest for me to understand and they help me answer my question about how nature makes people feel outside of their own world.