A Study On The Writing Of Biopolitics In Atwood’s Speculative Fiction

Margaret Atwood is a famous Canadian writer and critic.Her works have won the Booker Prize,the Kafka prize for literature and other awards.She is also a popular candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature in recent years.In her seventeen novels that have been published,the fiction of supposition expresses Atwood’s concern for the real world and anxiety about the future with its characteristics of basing itself on the reality of the present and the uncertainty of the future.This paper selects three sets（six in total）of Speculative novels series by Atwood as the research object,this paper discusses various problems of life after being involved by external factors,and mainly analyzes the Biopolitical writing of Atwood’s Speculative novels in combination with Foucault and Agamben ’s theory of Biopolitics.The paper is divided into three parts:introduction,four chapters and conclusion.The introduction introduces Atwood’s life and status.It also summarizes the research at home and abroad,then defines the concept of Biopolitical situation embodied in Atwood’s Speculative novels and texts,and briefly introduces the main problems that need to be studied.The first chapter analyzes the governance writing of Biopolitics in Atwood’s text,and clarifies how the"devices" in the giant "devices" of Biopolitics constructed in urban governance,population governance and body governance and considers the existence form and dilemma of life in this device.Chapter two further explores the predicament of people in this biopolitical situation,Firstly,it focuses on the occupation and deprivation of biological body by biomedicine.After the combination of biomedicine and politics supporting life,the purpose of power is to open some fields of self-control.At this time,life is controlled and objectified by medical health discourse and reproductive ethics.Self-control is internalized into the conspiracy of some oppressive forces.Although life presents an optimized state,it is facing the difficulty of moral and ethical identification.Secondly,explore the core driving force behind "Biopolitics"modern capital and the alienation of life.In order for the biological body to follow the governance mechanism of technology centric Biopolitics for a long time,modern biopolitics has been combined with the operation mode of capital proliferation.This logic occupies people’s discourse space by concocting display discourse and secretly controls people’s emotion.The third chapter focuses on the "anti-political" resistance writing of Atwood’s speculation about the various lives in the novel.Although she did not give the most perfect solution in these Speculative novels,she expressed her hope,bravely dispelled the destructive power of negative Biopolitics and tried to find the way of life liberation.She is good at using the gap and boundary in prison to carry out individual resistance:first,Atwood believes that the body is still an important field of resistance.She tries to find the self choice in the antelope’s dilemma,completes the antelope’s symbolic confirmation of self and promotes self-identity.With the help of the awakening of the maid’s consciousness and the desecration and escape of the body,she also aims to break the lie of Gilead’s "fertility focused" Biopolitics,reflecting the necessity of escape.Secondly,through the special "infancy" of Crakers,Atwood walked out of the road of original language and expressed their resistance to accurate scientific discourse.Finally,she completely destroyed the Biopolitics under the domination of technology through the charm of technology and the reconciliation between man and nature.The fourth chapter analyzes the uniqueness of the writing tactics of Biopolitics in Atwood’s fiction and the modern enlightenment of this writing.Atwood exerts the cognitive function of narration by inferring the unique text genre and structural form of the novel,and constructs a strange perspective through the practical and spatial nested narrative structure,subversive myth restatement and uncertain open ending.She also predicts the contradictions in life through ironic language,and pays attention to the alienated life.As a kind of literature similar to science fiction,Atwood uses this genre to reflect on the totalitarianism of life,the boundlessness of biotechnology,the contradiction between labor and capital and so on.Atwood’s Speculative novel describes the many discomfort faced by life after the intervention of external factors such as power,technology and capital in detail,as well as the resulting "problematic" of life itself,presents the subjective efforts inspired by life when adapting to and resisting external factors,as well as the utopian outcome of the ultimate possibility,and sends an appeal and warning to readers.The Biopolitical problems of life presented by her are undoubtedly realistic and of contemporary significance.