Apocalipse, sobrevivência e pós-humano: uma narrativa ecocrítica da trilogia Maddaddam, de Margareth Atwood

Abstract

The main objective of this thesis consists in offering a hermeneutic proposal based on ecocriticism, a theoretical, literary approach dealing, among several issues, with the relation between literature and environment. For that purpose, the corpus I have chosen to analyze is Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. As is common in contemporary literature, those three novels can be categorized as quite different genres, that is: dystopia, speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic narrative and/or cli-fi (short for climate change fiction, in English). The latter is indeed a political-cultural attempt and an innovative alternative for communicating the complex and unparalleled phenomenon of climate change (MEHNERT, 2016). The very characteristics of such a type of fiction are accordant with the notion of Anthropocene, a name the current historic period has been given in which the human is seen as a geological force. The MaddAddam speculative fiction is informed by the anthropogenic impacts on the planet, which are mainly caused by human technology. In her imagining a dark future for the planet, Atwood allows for the articulation of three operatory concepts — apocalypse, survival and post-human — which constitute the leading threads of my eco-literary analysis. The first is one of the ecocritical tropes in Garrard (2006)’s approach. The second, which in a sense is a keyword in Canadian literature according to Atwood’s own words, is a remarkable feature in the trilogy analyzed — such an aspect, by the way, is what allowed me to choose as a starting point its surviving human characters so as to carry out an ecocritical reading of it. As for the third key concept, I point out several post-human configurations in the trilogy, which go beyond the reductionist proposal in some of the studies presented in this work focusing on the Crakers alone, the latter being humanoids created to replace the human species in the trilogy’s post-apocalyptic scenario. In addition to these three operatory concepts, my thesis proposal is aimed at providing an understanding of other terminologies that help constitute the theoretical framework of this analysis, which is based on environmental humanities’ interdisciplinary sources. Lastly, inasmuch as the ecocritical approach is not accounted for by a single method, my proposal is the narrative scholarship, which consists of an analytic blend of personal account and literary criticism and is often used by ecocriticism researchers in English-speaking countries.