Stories to make us human: twenty-first century dystopian novels by women

• Autor(a) principal: Melissa Cristina Silva de Sá
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/34288
• topic: dystopian literature; storytelling; women; Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929-2018 – The telling – Crítica e interpretação; Winterson, Jeanette, 1959- – The Stone Gods – Crítica e interpretação; Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939- – MaddAddam – Crítica e interpretação; Ficção americana – História e crítica; Escritoras; Mulheres e literatura

Dystopian novels written by women in the twenty-first century tend to bring storytelling to the center of their narratives. The importance of telling stories in dystopias is nothing new: it is present in classics of the genre like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1951). Nonetheless, women writers have associated this discussion on storytelling to the matter of being human. In the last decades, several novels have presented this trend, such as the ones by Ursula K. Le Guin, Mar-garet Atwood, and Octavia Butler. These texts rework science fiction’s traditional conventions such as male protagonists, the dichotomy of technology being either purely good or catastroph-ically evil, and a westernized view of humankind. This dissertation investigates a trend in twen-ty-first century dystopian novels by women that thematizes storytelling and the sharing of expe-riences in narratives in which the act of telling stories humanize what is initially considered non-human. In the selected novels, storytelling is used by aliens, robots, and genetically engi-neered creatures to challenge what it means to be human, debunking traditional definitions of humanity and proposing alternative ways of living that point to other possibilities of social ar-rangements outside the current biological, evolutionary, and cultural view of humanity. In this context, traditional humanity is defined based on the idea of humans in opposition to animals, having intellect and creativity, being able to create cultural products. From the dystopian nov-els by women read for this research, I chose three to triangulate common topics inside the pat-tern of using storytelling to discuss and challenge what being human means: Le Guin’s The Tell-ing (2000), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), and Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013). I also refer to other novels to illustrate points and present convergences and divergences. I con-sider the concept of dystopia and its relation to storytelling from a feminist point of view draw-ing mainly on Raffaella Baccolini’s and Tom Moylan’s debates in the field of utopian studies. Storytelling is analyzed in the novels in relation to Walter Benjamin’s text, “The Storyteller,” Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, and Brian Boyd’s On The Origins of Stories. The matter of knowledge present in these dystopian novels by women is considered by examining the pro-posed alternative communities formed in the texts. Finally, humanity as a category is discussed using mainly Boyd’s considerations on evocriticism in contrast to the post-human perspective usually taken. The pattern observed in these dystopian novels by women reveals the many pre-occupations of the twenty-first century through the bleak lens of dystopia, but with a critical twist that provides reflections on possible alternatives to humans’ current ways of living. It is by telling stories that these alternatives are proposed.