Housebreaking the Human Animal
Humanism and the Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8865693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hannes Bergthaller (0000-0003-3990-4325, National Chung Hsing University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 91 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 728-743 |
| Publication date | 2010-10-30 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2010.518042 |
| OpenAlex | W2071979621 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 16 |
| References cited | 9 |
This article discusses Margaret Atwood's novels Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood in the context of sustainability. The novels present the ecological crisis as arising from flaws in humanity's biological make-up; sustainability is thus a question of housebreaking the human animal, that is, of aligning human behaviour to the requirements of the planetary oikos. Through her protagonists, Atwood explores possible answers to this question which can be understood as anthropotechnologies in the sense outlined by Peter Sloterdijk in his controversial essay “Rules for the Human Zoo”. Similar to the latter, Atwood's novels arrive at a qualified humanism informed by evolutionary biology and disenchanted with human nature
Archaeology · Biology · Context (archaeology · Environmental ethics · Flood myth · Humanism · Humanity · Oryx · Political science · Sociology · Sustainability · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Ecology · History · Law · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
"Time to go"
Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Between the Mythical and the Ironic
“Jimmy didn’t envy him. (He envied him.)”
Posthuman Affirmative Business Ethics
Sustainable Literary Competence
Subjectal Scale and Micro-biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene
Climate change in literature and literary criticism
Climate Change Imaginaries? Examining Expectation Narratives in Cli-Fi Novels
Merging facts with fiction
Are we what we eat or what we worship? Food activism and fanaticism in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood
Developing more-than-human sustain-abilities in the ecocritical classroom
Using Ecotopian Fiction to Reimagine Public Policy
Canada
A “joke-filled romp” through end times
Margaret Atwood's Straddling Environmentalism
| Citations per year | 1.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2024 (14) |
| Highly cited | No |