A Reconsideration And Reconciliation Of The Relationship Between The Human And The Nonhuman ——An Analysis Of Margaret Atwood’s Madd Addam Trilogy In The Light Of Critical Posthumanism

The high-tech biotechnology enables mankind to enter the post-human era.Thereafter,a shift in the current ethical paradigm appeared with the transformation of all kinds of organisms and the change of human organisms.Moreover,tensions between humans and posthumans,animals,and genetically altered humanoid species,deepen with the progression of environmental destruction and climate change.Under such a social circumstance,the Madd Addam trilogy came to the public.They are speculative novels about how to overcome Anthropocentrism.The trilogy fictions a society in which biological science ignores all forms of life in pursuit of profits,which leads to the outbreak of ‘Waterless Flood’.This dissertation aims to investigate the Madd Addam trilogy from the perspective of critical posthumanism.Critical posthumanism criticizes,deconstructs,and develops humanism.It announces the end of an anthropocentric era.Braidotti’s ‘zoe-egalitarianism’,Haraway’s concept of ‘companion species’,and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming’ are all important parts of critical posthumanism.Based on these three theoretical concepts,this dissertation explores the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in the trilogy.The author argues that the trinity of Jimmy/Snowman/Snowman-the-Jimmy reflects the writer’s criticism of the binary oppositions and hierarchies;while the way humans and animals interact reflects a posthumanistic companion-species relationship proposed by Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto;the relationship between the pigoon and the human indicates an ‘aparallel evolution’ in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming’;the image of Crakers integrates all the three theoretical concepts and embodies aggregation and collaboration in the trilogy.Therefore,the trilogy becomes an allegory in the view of critical posthumanism,which reminds mankind that the only hope of survival in the posthuman era lies in the establishment of interspecies cooperation instead of boundaries,hierarchy,and exploitation.This is not only a necessary reconciliation between the human and the non-human,but also a profound reconsideration of the contemporary social relations.