Virtuality, Globalization, and Neo-primitivism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
學年 99
學期 2
出版（發表）日期 2011-04-15
作品名稱 Virtuality, Globalization, and Neo-primitivism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
作品名稱（其他語言）
著者 黃逸民
單位
出版者
著錄名稱、卷期、頁數 Foreign Literature Studies 33(2), pp.7-17
摘要 The globalization of the imagination is one of the most prominent issues that Margaret Atwood tries to address in Oryx and Crake. Actually Atwood has been obsessed with the liminal situation between the “virtual” and the “real” in her major novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, two of the most obvious examples. The ambiguity between human and post-human is another liminality that fascinates Atwood. In other words, the rampant technophilia illustrated by the ubiquitous Internet in the globalization of culture is so vividly depicted in Oryx and Crake that Atwood urges us to confront with the current denatured culture emphasizing only the fabricated and artificial in the false dichotomy of culture and nature. In this paper, I also want to draw attention to the risk of homogenization that globalization might bring to us. I intent to argue that Atwood seems to imply that nature means “otherness” or “elsewhere” to the linguistic discourse. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood also wants to alert us to the danger of social crisis of the creation of a vast megamachine. The empire of megamachine encompasses transnational capital and the nation-state system and acts through the global industrialized technological system. I’ll also use Vandana Shiva’s critique of development and corporate globalization, which is seen as a transformation of colonization to read Atwood’s portrayal of the domination of the “other.” In this novel, Atwood intends to warn us against the technologizing of the world and insists on the faith in nature as difference, as the sites of resistance, as something other than or alien to us. Neo-primitivism here means the restoration of the appeal of the sacred to honor the otherness of nature. As Paul Hawken argues, in “A Declaration of Sustainability,” Atwood also urges us to shift from electronic literacy to biological literacy to acknowledge the otherness of nature with its clear implication of the need of modesty in our claims to understand nature and its obvious critique of our technological desire to be supermen and bring everything under absolute control. 全球化是瑪格麗特·阿特伍德在《末世男女》中所關注的眾多精彩議題之一。事實上, 在她廣為人知的小說《使女的故事》及《末世男女》中, 阿特伍德就對她長久以來深感興趣的議題—存乎於虛擬與現實之間的曖昧狀態—多所著墨, 而人類與後人類之間曖昧不明的界線, 則是另一個讓阿特伍德也大為著迷的議題。換言之, 早在《末世男女》裡, 阿特伍德就嘲諷性地批判科技狂痴於網路建構中、科技全球代之下的荒誕不經。在《末世男女》中, 阿特伍德警醒吾人創造超級機械帝國, 可能引發的社會與生態危機。本文中將援用印度生態學者紈妲娜·希瓦(Vandana Shiva)對於發展企業全球化實為新殖民主議之批判。於《末世男女》, 阿特伍德除了警告吾人世界科技化的後果, 也深信自然即多樣、即反抗的場所、即異於我們。在此, 本文提出的新原始主議意味著重建自然神聖的魅力, 尊重自然中既有的他者性。如保羅·霍肯在《永續宣言》裡所言, 阿特伍德鼓勵吾人應從數字知識轉換至生物知識, 在我們宣稱了解自然之際, 應當承認自然裡既存的他者性, 對自然謙卑之需要, 更是批判人類想成為超人, 控制一切的科技野心之不當。
關鍵字 Margaret Atwood;Oryx and Crake;virtuality;globalization;neo-primitivism
語言 en_US
ISSN 1003-7519
期刊性質 國外
收錄於 A&HCI
產學合作
通訊作者
審稿制度 是
國別 CHN
公開徵稿
出版型式 ,電子版,紙本
相關連結

機構典藏連結 ( http://tkuir.lib.tku.edu.tw:8080/dspace/handle/987654321/106319 )