From Zero Hour to Kudzucene: Reading Margaret Atwood’s Post-Millennial Novels under the Auspices of Anthropocene Thought

Abstract

This thesis reads the post-millennial novels of acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood with the aim of exploring the possibilities for narrating the Anthropocene in an epoch that resists both intelligibility and description. In so doing, the thesis seeks to address a key issue for literary studies in this new epoch: what stories is it possible to tell in the Anthropocene? What new methods of writing are able to meet the challenges of these times? Or perhaps these ways of writing are instead very old, such as Atwood’s retellings of Homer and Shakespeare in The Penelopiad and Hag Seed In this thesis fiction is shown to be a vital mode through which to model ways of thinking with complexity in the Anthropocene. The thesis begins by elaborating the concept of ‘zero hour’ that it takes up from the MaddAddam trilogy, with reference to which it explores what it means to grapple with this moment of knowing the Anthropocene and how this changes our relationship with the world in which we live. Returning in conclusion to the MaddAddam trilogy, the thesis explores the strange life of the Anthropocene through the concept of the ‘kudzucene’, which it develops with reference to the exuberant vines that wind through the post-plague ecology of these novels. Atwood’s fiction traces an important movement from the moment of pause at the dawn of the self-conscious Anthropocene, which can be seen in The Blind Assassin, to a moment of recognition of the essential entanglement of this epoch in The Heart Goes Last. Through a coda in which it turns to The Testaments, the thesis ends by reflecting on the potential thoughtways provided by Atwood’s motif of stone in the present geological epoch. This thesis draws on theorists such as Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and Bruno Latour in order to advance a non-innocent politics of hope by staying with the uncanny Anthropocene, taking from Atwood’s oeuvre an orientation towards the future that is at once unknown but, at the same time, teeming with as-yet undiscovered potential.