Margaret Atwood Demarcated Post Human World

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Mojgan Abshavi ¹ (Assistant Professor, Department of English, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran)

Received: 2021-09-02 Accepted : 2021-09-02 Published : 2021-09-01

Keywords: Margaret Atwood, Cyborg, Donna Haraway, MaddAddam, Post human,

Abstract :

The present study tries to analyze Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy in the light of Donna Haraway's “cyborg theory.” Atwood chooses the term “speculative fiction” for her trilogy to speculate the process of identity transformation as a result of scientific and technological developments. She aims to warn people against technological developments and economic practices that lead to environmental degradation. The trilogy reveals humanity’s organic connections with non-human beings through interspecies gene-splicing and the ensuing hybridity. Here the post-human as the inevitable outcome of the amalgamation of humanity and technology appears. One of the main pillars of post-human thought is the use of technology as a means to ameliorate human life by helping overcome the flaws and limitations of the biological body. Atwood's fictional world can be argued to manifest what Haraway explains as the “cyborg theory.” Haraway holds that cyborgs are “hybrids of machine and organism” and their mechanical and organic components are inseparable. Therefore, Haraway's cyborg is a possible figure of new human beings as creatures of social reality. Haraway's theory is clearly present in Atwood's trilogy since the strange hybrid creatures in the novels are the same as Haraway’s cyborgs, and the world portrayed in these stories is a world with extremely advanced technology and progressive projects.

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