I argue that Margaret Atwood’s work in MaddAddam is about survival; it is about moving beyond preconceived, thoughtless ideology of any form with creative kinship. Cooperation and engagement cannot be planned in advance, and must take the form of something more than pre-established ideology. I will discuss MaddAddam in light of Donna Haraway’s recent work in which she argues that multispecies acknowledgement and collaboration are essential if humans are to survive and thrive in the coming centuries. By bringing the two texts into dialogue, one sees that Atwood’s novel constitutes the kind of story deemed necessary by Haraway for making kin in the Chthulucene. Various scenes depicting cooperation and interdependence among humans and other animals offer chthonic models of kinship; these relationships, as opposed to ideological and anthropocentric isolation, will serve as the means of surviving and thriving within an ongoing apocalypse. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This study considers the way in which Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy functions as an environmental project. The main focus is on how the three novels, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), simultaneously draw on and destabilise the apocalypticism inherent in so much environmental discourse, primarily through the use of satire. The trilogy is securely anchored in the concerns of contemporary readers, and transposition of the action to the near future is integral to Atwood’s environmental project: attention is focussed on the present causes of anticipated environmental catastrophe, which readers implicitly are implored to avoid. Atwood’s environmentalism is performed in the interplay between her literary stature, the equivocal content of her work, and the irreverence with which she metaleptically blurs distinctions between fact and fiction, art and commodity, and activism and aesthetics. Whereas the satiric mode serves as a way of avoiding some of the limitations of apocalyptic thinking by maintaining and even creating complexity, it also renders the entire project ambiguous. Uncertainty about the exact environmental injunction presented in the trilogy creates doubts about the degree to which Atwood’s extradiegetic environmental activism should be taken seriously, or conversely. Storytelling is foregrounded in all three novels, and through its concurrent critique of and reliance on market forces and the political potential of art, the MaddAddam Trilogy demonstrates that there is no external position from which the imagination can perform environmentalist miracles. As such, Atwood’s environmental project furthers a profoundly ecological understanding of the world. / Margaret Atwood routinely eludes her readers, and the MaddAddam Trilogy is no exception. These three novels, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), are ostensibly written in the tradition of environmental apocalypse, yet they constantly undermine its conventions through satire. This study considers the trilogy as an environmental project, performed in the interplay between Atwood’s literary stature, the ambiguous content of her work, and the irreverence with which she blurs distinctions between fact and fiction, art and commodity, and activism and aesthetics. Atwood’s use of the MaddAddam Trilogy in her real-world environmental activism creates uncertainty about how seriously both her art and her activism should be taken. Her opinions on environmental matters are legitimised, but at the same time an urgent environmental ‘message’ is presented as entertainment. Atwood’s message often appears circular: her art carries no message, but Margaret Atwood the writer does have an important message, which she gets to deliver precisely because of her art. Storytelling is a central theme in all three novels, and through both critiquing and relying on commercialism, the MaddAddam Trilogy demonstrates that there is no external position from which the imagination can perform environmentalist miracles. As such, Atwood’s environmental project furthers a profoundly ecological understanding of the world.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy has received substantial critical attention inthe fields of ecocriticism, the ethics of bioengineering, and feminist theory. However, the vast majority of this criticism has focussed on Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, the first two books in the trilogy. By displacing human narrators in MaddAddam, the third and final book, Atwood re-contextualises the entire trilogy asno longer being a meticulously researched speculative fiction, and instead a type of fable, along the lines of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” Through this shift, Atwood asserts the need to replace the perception of a progression of metanarratives in contemporary cultural thought with concurrent, transitory micronarratives. This thesis is divided into three main sections, each examining the different communities which Atwood depicts. The first section uses the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-François Lyotard on the state of knowledge in the postmodern habitat to explore how Atwood presents a fracture between scientific and narrative knowledge, which the Compounds in her novels propagate to impose a hierarchy over their citizenship. The second section moves to a more character focussed perspective, using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s development of ‘homosocial’ triangles, it examines how the character Crake internalises the enforced societal hierarchy between scientific and narrative knowledge, and uses these non-sexual terms to perform a sexual triangle containing himself and other characters. The final section explores the shift of perspective in the third novel, and how the displacement of humanity as the centre of the narrative exposes the unsustainable position of appealing to metanarratives of progression. Through this analysis, Atwood can be seen to be exposing the fallacy that new knowledge usurps old knowledge, and that all contexts of understanding exist simultaneously, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing where they have interpretive utility.

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.