Canadian author Margaret Atwood gained fame in the 1980s with her ruthless denunciation of patriarchy in her 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale. Her attention turned to a more general take on contemporary society with her Madaddam trilogy, published between 2003 and 2013. These novels describe a North America that is in the process of being devastated by the evils of very late capitalism: rampant inequality, environmental melt-down, crazy science, and cultish extremism.
In this seminar we will read these four novels, as we strive to understand their generic and thematic concerns. How do we categorize them? Are they post-apocalyptic? are they fictions of the future? speculative fiction? science fiction? What difference does it make to our understanding of them that we categorize them in one or another way? Then, what is the link between contemporary society and the society that is depicted in the novels? Finally, how do the narrative structures and devices function, how are readers positioned to respond? As we look at these formal and generic concerns, we will be reading for an array of themes, such as gender discrimination and violence against women, the environment, animal studies, the limits of science, the entanglement of authoritarianism and capitalism, to mention but a few.