UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Dottorato di Ricerca in Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere XXVIII Ciclo Over the Brink of Environmental Collapse Power, Religion, and Nature in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy Tesi di Dottorato di: Adele Tiengo R09979 Tutor: Prof. Carlo Pagetti Coordinatore del Dottorato: Prof.ssa Giuliana Garzone Anno Accademico 2014/2015 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Introductory Remarks. DEFINITIONS AND TRANSGRESSIONS OF A NARRATIVE GENRE .......................... 1 I. The Origins of a Literary Tradition: Science Fiction in Canada .................................... 1 II. Discussing the Boundaries of Science Fiction as a Genre .............................................. 9 III. Discussing the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: the Debate between Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin ............................................................................................. 14 Chapter 1. INTERPRETATIVE TOOLS FOR THE MADDADDAM TRILOGY ................................ 27 1.1. Methodology ...................................................................................................................... 27 1.2. Oryx and Crake.................................................................................................................... 42 1.3. The Year of the Flood ........................................................................................................... 53 1.4. MaddAddam ........................................................................................................................ 62 Chapter 2. ORYX AND CRAKE: POWER POLITICS AND RESISTANCE THROUGH PARODY ...... 71 2.1. A Taxonomy of Power .............................................................................. 72 2.1.1. The responsibility of the writer and the power of narration ................................ 74 2.1.2. Oryx: the creation of an unusual victim .................................................................. 78 2.1.3. Oryx: the subverting power of a non-victim ........................................................... 83 2.2. Terrorism and Self-Terrorism .................................................................. 89 2.2.1. A brief history of the term and of the Canadian experience ................................. 90 2.2.2. Atwood on terrorism: “Letter to America” ............................................................. 93 2.2.3. Terrorism in Oryx and Crake: the (absent) mother as terrorist .............................. 98 2.3. Resistance through Parody .................................................................... 106 2.3.1. The critical debate on irony, satire, and parody ................................................... 107 2.3.2. A parody of science .................................................................................................. 112 2.3.3. An entanglement of myths ...................................................................................... 118 Chapter 3. THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD: THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE AND OF RELIGIOUS NARRATIVES ........................................................................................................... 123 3.1. Cosmogonies: The Origin of Culture and the Foundation of the God’s Gardeners’ Religion ....................................................................................... 124 3.1.1. Reflections upon the definition of culture ............................................................. 126 3.1.2. From culture to religion: the Genesis in The Year of the Flood .............................. 135 3.2. Tending the Garden to Cultivate the Spirit: Theological Doctrine and Its Implementation ......................................................................................... 142 3.2.1. Spiritual skepticism and secular worries ............................................................... 143 3.2.2. A confrontation of theologies and the culture of gardening: The Year of the Flood and The Handmaid’s Tale ..................................................................................................... 150 3.3. Eden Vs New Jerusalem: A Confrontation of Dreams ...................... 158 3.3.1. Eden, New Jerusalem, and their offshoots ............................................................. 159 3.3.2. The evolutionary advantage of apocalypse ........................................................... 171 Chapter 4. MADDADDAM: OLD AND NEW NARRATIVES OF NATURE .................................. 177 4.1. What Kind of Nature? ............................................................................ 178 4.1.1. Discourses on nature and on the environment ..................................................... 179 4.1.2. The postmodernist debate ........................................................................................ 182 4.1.3. Postmodern ecology in “Bearlift” ........................................................................... 189 4.2. Beyond Extinction: Old and New Species ........................................... 195 4.2.1. The tragic and the comic in extinction narratives ................................................. 196 4.2.2. Genetically engineered animals: facts and fiction ................................................ 200 4.2.3. The evolution of the species: Pigoons and Crakers .............................................. 206 4.3. Conclusions. The Story Goes On .......................................................... 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 221 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I feel that this dissertation has been nourished by the support and friendship of a number of people, and I would like to thank at least some of them. I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Professor Carlo Pagetti, for encouraging me to widen the scope of my research to broader perspectives. His tireless and sympathetic guidance led me through the three years of my Ph.D. with constant care and confidence in my work. A substantial part of my research has been conducted in Canada, at Robarts Library, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and E.J. Pratt Library at the University of Toronto. My three-month research stay was funded by the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and I would like to express my gratitude to the Bursary Awards Committee members, Ebbe Klitgård (Chair), Andreas Jucker, and Lilla Maria Crisafulli, for granting me this opportunity. Marlene Goldman and Smaro Kamboureli of the University of Toronto fed my body and spirit with dinners and books, and they have opened my mind to the depth and width of Canadian literature. My gratitude also goes to Anne Harrison and Marguerite Perry for heartily welcoming me in my Torontonian home. My academic life has been significantly enriched by the people that I have met in the United States. I would like to thank the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and the Institute for World Literature for their financial support, which gave me access to stimulating academic environments and a few dear friends, too. I thank Agnes Kneitz, Arnauld Barras, Başak Ağın Dönmez, and Christian Hummelsund Voie, among others, for making conferences a form of amusement. The “bohemian comparativists and linguists” Nina and Gašper Beguš and Guangchen Chen introduced me to the marvels of Harvard and Massachusetts. Their friendship is a light shining bright even at oceanic distance. Throughout my doctoral career, I have been blessed with the opportunity to widen my academic interests beyond the topic of my research project. I am grateful to the League of European Research Universities (LERU) for selecting me to attend the Bright Conference at the Universities of Freiburg and Strasbourg in 2012 and the Doctoral Summer School at the University of Oxford in 2015. The professors and students from all disciplines that I have met in these occasions truly expanded the boundaries of my knowledge and proved that the dialogue between the sciences and the humanities is not only possible, but also highly entertaining. The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan has been much more than just a workplace. I would like to express my earnest appreciation to Alessandro Vescovi, Andrea Meregalli, Damiano Rebecchini, Giuliana Iannaccaro, Paola Loreto, and Silvia Riva for welcoming me in the research group WorldLiterature@Unimi. Through the insightful and always stimulating discussions on the global scope of literature, I have also learned the value of scholarly collaboration. I have received enthusiastic support from Nicoletta Brazzelli, who provided me with insightful advice and sincere friendship, and from Francesca Chiappini, who could understand my concerns and doubts better than anyone else. My deepest gratitude also goes to Professor Serenella Iovino. Without her, my passions for literature and for the natural world would have never joined in with “the entangled bank” of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”. Last, but not least, I thank my family for their unconditional love, and Matteo for always believing in me, in spite of everything. Introductory Remarks. DEFINITIONS AND TRANSGRESSIONS OF A NARRATIVE GENRE Contradict yourself. In order to live you must remain broken up. Wyndham Lewis I. The Origins of a Literary Tradition: Science Fiction in Canada Canadian literary identity is the subject of continuous debates, which constantly require careful delimitations