Refashioning Letters, Words, and Stories in Margaret Atwood

چکیده مقاله

This paper attempts to portray the literary coordinates of the speculative world of Margaret Atwood’s 21st century novels, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) to investigate the appropriation of language. Atwood forecasts an imminent future for Earth and human species in which a laboratory-made pandemic destroys almost all human beings while the endangered Earth survives with a handful of human survivors and a small group of gene-spliced brand-new human beings. The defining characteristic of survival seems to be a capability to recognize letters, to use words, and to narrate stories in contrast to the priority given to “number” proficiency in the present world. The novels are a speculation of what might happen if human beings continued exploiting technologies and nanotechnologies to interfere in nature. Atwood writes futuristically, but the trilogy is a rewrite of the history of human genesis and their nomenclatural identity. The result is not only a present-based forecast, but also an arguable hindcast. While the starting point is the novelistic world, it is the myth of language that will be cultivated in the paper.