This thesis investigates three contemporary Canadian texts— Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Rita Wong’s forage—that treat information as an object that can be wasted and recuperated. Using information theory and a new sub-field of critical waste theory called “Discard Studies,” I explore how the authors studied in this thesis place these two lines of thought alongside one another to examine how the concept of recycling information challenges the material, cultural, and ideological structures that distance humans from their waste. Specifically, I read the event of recycling as an interruptive act that triggers a reassessment of the (im)material connections that tether humans to their waste, vast (inter)national networks of exchange, and environmental crises related to our garbage.

Ce projet examine comment la politique et l’amitié sont actualisées dans la fiction spéculative du XXIe siècle à travers différents médias. Cette thèse aborde la manière dont ces relations interpersonnelles affectent la sphère sociale et le statu quo des mondes fictifs à l’étude. Pour orienter la discussion, j’utilise le concept d’autonomie relationnelle qui reconnaît l’interdépendance des individus autonomes et de la communauté en général et l’éthique du care qui environne la moralité comme étant relationnelle et contextualisée. L’utilisation conjointe de ces deux cadres me permet de discuter de la façon dont les amitiés sont propices à la participation politique. Le premier chapitre présente une discussion globale de The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) de Margaret Atwood et notamment de son influence au sein du genre de la fiction spéculative féministe. Ensuite, dans une première section, je me concentre sur les notions d’autonomie par rapport à l’adaptation graphique du roman d’Atwood par Renée Nault (2019), que je compare avec la bande dessinée Bitch Planet de Kelly Sue DeConnick et Valentine de Landro (2013-2017). Dans une seconde section, je me concentre sur l’éthique du care en tant que processus pouvant favoriser des amitiés empreintes d’implications politiques en analysant l’adaptation télévisée de The Handmaid’s Tale, produite par Hulu, et la série Orphan Black, produite par BBC America. La fiction spéculative permet d’expérimenter librement avec différentes idées politiques et de comprendre comment la société pourrait réagir dans des scénarios extrêmes. Ces expériences de pensée reflètent nos propres luttes et lacunes politiques et pourraient ultimement indiquer de meilleures façons de résoudre les problèmes actuels. / This project examines how politics and friendship are actualized in speculative fiction across different media in the twenty-first century. This thesis discusses how these interpersonal relationships affect the social sphere and the status quo of the fictional worlds in question. To guide the discussion, I use the concept of relational autonomy, which recognizes the interconnectedness of both autonomous individuals and the community at large, and ethics of care, which understands morality as relational and contextualized. I use these two frameworks in tandem to discuss how friendships are conducive to political participation. The first chapter presents an overarching discussion of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) in its legacy to the feminist speculative fiction genre. Following, in the first section, I focus on notions of autonomy in relation to Renée Nault's graphic novel adaptation of Atwood’s novel (2019) and contrast it with Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro’s comic Bitch Planet (2013-2017). In the second section, I focus on the ethics of care as a process that can foster friendships with political implications by analyzing Hulu's TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale and BBC America's Orphan Black. SF offers the freedom to test different political ideas and to understand how society might react in extreme scenarios. These thought experiments reflect our own political struggles and shortcomings; ultimately, they might point at better ways to solve current problems.

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This thesis considers the understudied issue of genetic engineering as it has been deployed in the literature of the late 20th century. With reference to the concept of the enlightened gender hybridity of Cyborg theory and an eye to ecocritical implications, I read four texts: Joan Slonczewski's 1986 science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean, Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy Lilith's Brood – originally released between 1987 and 1989 as Xenogenesis – Simon Mawer's 1997 literary novel Mendel's Dwarf, and the first two books in Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction MaddAddam series: 2003's Oryx and Crake and 2009's The Year Of the Flood. I argue that the inclusion of genetic engineering has changed as the technology moves from science fiction to science fact, moving from the fantastic to the mundane. Throughout its recent literary history, genetic engineering has played a role in complicating questions of sexuality, paternity, and the division between nature and culture. It has also come to represent a nexus of potential cultural change, one which stands to fulfill the dramatic hybridity Haraway rhapsodized in her "Cyborg Manifesto" while also containing the potential to disrupt the ecocritical conversation by destroying what we used to understand as nature. Despite their four different takes on the issue, each of the texts I read offers a complex vision of utopian hopes and apocalyptic fears. They agree that, for better or for worse, genetic engineering is forever changing both our world and ourselves.

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The main goal of this PhD dissertation is to explore the relation between postmodern poetics and some features of other theories developed at the same time in various areas of knowledge – mainly metaphysics, physics and sociology. If we can say that the modern paradigm was born with the question of how a multiplicity of different points of view could coexist, the postmodern paradigm seems to arise with the awareness that a systematic legitimation of differences cannot be based on a sole foundation that leads to a complete inclusion. For this reason, we argue that the concept of possible world is not only a useful heuristic metaphor adopted in different areas of the artistic and scientific postmodern culture, but it can put in constructive conversation different areas of knowledge which are usually thought to be more isolated and refractory to mutual influence than they actually are. Precisely because of the diverse usages and meanings that the term ‘world’ acquires in different contexts, the ontological commitment toward possible worlds varies significantly. They can be godly concepts, fictional scenarios, real sums of individuals that are isolated from each other, or ideal set of objects that are associated with different and mutually exclusive frames of reference and cultural coordinates. To shed a light on these matters is the main goal of the first book, entitled "What is a possible world?". The second book, entitled "Entangled worlds: the postmodernist literature", is committed to explore the topology of the possible worlds projected by postmodernist texts; in fact, the paradoxical topology that emerges from these texts appears to be inherently connected with a vast range of issues concerning our world.

瑪格麗特‧愛特伍的《瘋狂亞當三部曲》描繪了當代讀者所熟悉的世界: 一個受新自由主義浪潮席捲的社會。當政府權力被龐大財團架空，自由國家的民主核心價值早已崩解。 本篇論文的論點延伸自Chris Vials 的文章，並試圖以新自由主義統治論述來解釋小說中民主與極權融為一體的情況。第一章解釋新經濟思維使個人與社會產生疏離，以統治極端分化的社會階層。第二章則闡述小說中的國家已陷入例外狀態，法律受到懸置，而圍牆的設立強化了排除生命的機制並且產生 “裸命”。在最後的章節將探討上帝的園丁會 “生命-形式” 的革命以及《瘋狂亞當》的主角澤伯所展現的 “無身份” 抵抗的可能性。 如同書中角色，身處於當代的讀者正受到這股 “未來的浪潮” 推進向前卻同時又受到過去的夢靨所困。世界大戰、猶太人集中營不只是已過去的歷史事實，他們以不同形式再現且縈繞不去。如何撿拾過去的傷痛與錯誤，承接死去之人的意志正是我們必須肩負的責任。 / In Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, the author imagines a near future that is too familiar for the reader who live in the contemporary period, a neoliberal society. Through the depiction of a hollowed-out nation replaced by a giant consortium, she lays bare a truth that democracy is going to collapse. Based on Chris Vials’ article, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopic Fiction and the Contradictions of Neoliberal Freedom,” this thesis furthers to elaborate the integration of democratic regime and totalitarianism by discourse of neoliberal governance: the neoliberal rationality alienates individuals, uniting the divided social stratifications. In the second part, I suggest that the nation falls into an anarchy since it has already entered into a state of exception, which gives rise to “bare life.” The exclusion mechanism is represented by the construction of “the Walls.” The third chapter aims to discuss the possibility of resisting the new form of sovereign power in practice of the God’s Gardeners about how to live “form-of-life” and politics of “(non)-identity” deployed by Zeb, the protagonist of MaddAddam. Like the characters, we stand in the intersection of the “Wave of future” and the recurring nightmare in the past. Global wars and concentration camp are not only historical facts but recurring events. It is our responsibility to recall the memory, remember the pain, and inherit the will of the dead.

The screen, as recent studies in a number of fields indicate, is a cultural object due for critical reappraisal. Work on the theoretical status of screen objects tends to focus upon the materialisation of surface; in other words, it attempts to rethink the relationship between the supposedly 'superficial' facade and the 'functional' object itself. I suggest that this work, while usefully chipping away at the dichotomy between the 'superficial' and the 'functional', can lead us to a more radical conclusion when read in the context of subjectivity. By rethinking the relationship between the surface and the obverse face of the screen as the terms of a dialectic, we can ‘read’ the screen as the vital component in a process which constitutes the Subject. In order to demonstrate this, I analyse productions of subjectivity in literary texts of the twenty-first century — in doing so, I assume the novel as nonpareil arena of the dramatisation of subjectivity — and I propose a reading of the work of Jacques Lacan as hitherto unacknowledged theorist par excellence of the form and function of the screen. Lacan describes, with the function of desire and the formation of the screen of fantasy, the primary position this ‘screen-form' inhabits in the constitution of the Subject. Lacan’s work forms a critical juncture through which we must proceed if we are to properly read and understand the chosen texts: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber; The Tain by China Miéville; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. In each text, I analyse the particular materialisations of the screen and interrogate the constitution of the subject and the locus of desire. By analysing the vicissitudes of subjectivity in these texts, I make a claim for the study of the screen as constituting a central question in the field of contemporary literature.

本論文將用榮格的原型觀念(archetypes)探討瑪格麗特˙愛德伍小說《盲眼刺客》中的人物性格。 本論文由五章組成。第一章將大略介紹《盲眼刺客》的內容以及其評論。第二章將會介紹榮格對集體無意識(the collective unconscious)的概念以及其和原型概念的關連；接著，將會根據兩位新榮格學派的學者，瑪莉恩˙伍德曼(Marion Woodman)和卡蘿˙皮爾森(Carol S. Pearson)對原型理論的闡述，針對兩個原型加以探討──鬥士原型和殉道者原型。在父權社會的影響下，這兩個原型時常會被過度簡化成對兩性的刻板印象，而在這簡化過程裡，原本屬於這兩個原型的能量和複雜性都被忽視或壓抑了。 第三章始於對愛德伍小說人物的辯護，說明其人物並不是一般所說的刻版人物，而是充滿衝突與能量的原型人物。而後，我會把小說中的人物和象徵和神話及童話中的人物作連結。在一方面，我將會對於小說中的現實人物，如艾麗絲和蘿拉(Iris and Laura)，和小說中的象徵角色，盲眼刺客和獻祭少女，做連結且並討論；另一方面，我將會將這兩個象徵角色延伸出去，探討與之相關的神話或童話人物，或是，更上一層的原型人物。在第四章，我則會依據小說人物和其原型的關係加以剖析，檢視他們和其原型的認同狀況，及他們膨脹(Inflation)的程度。 在最後的第五章，將以原型的概念來詮釋小說中各個人物的悲劇做為總結。《盲眼刺客》中的每個人物都傾向於過份認同某個原型，而忽略了讓自我有平衡發展的重要性。 / This thesis is to discover the psychological depths of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and to analyze them according to the Jungian conception of archetypes and the influence of archetypes upon the human psyche. This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction, including the overview of the novel and its critical backgrounds. And Chapter Two introduces C.G. Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious and its relation with archetypes and follow with specific discussion of certain archetypes—the Warrior and the Martyr—mainly according to the theories of two neo-Jungian scholars, Marion Woodman and Carol S. Pearson. Since these two archetypes are often over-simplified to fit in gender stereotypes under the influence of patriarchal society, the energies and complexity of these archetypes are always neglected or repressed. Chapter Three begins with an argument that Atwood’s characters are not stereotypical but rather archetypal, for they possess the contradictory energies within them that are correspondent with that of archetypes. On the one hand, I discuss how the characters in the memoir are symbolized in the science-fiction allegory, being reflected as the blind assassin and the sacrificial maiden; on the other hand, I make a connection between the symbols of the novel—the blind assassin and sacrificial maiden—and the mythological and fairy-tale allusions, and further, the archetypes behind them. In Chapter Four, I examine the psychic problems of the characters according to their relations with the archetypes—to examine how much they identify unconsciously with the archetypes and the extent of their inflation. Finally, Chapter Five concludes with the archetypal explanation of the tragic life of the characters in the novel. Each of them is trapped in an overwhelming power of a certain archetype instead of having the ego balanced between these multiple archetypes, they turn themselves into mythical figures that are too rigid for humanity.

This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.