Storytelling defining humans in twenty-first century dystopian novels

Resumo

The conflict between humans and creatures considered non-humans is a major part of a particular trend in twenty-first-century dystopian novels written by women published in English. In these novels, storytelling is used to push on the boundaries of what being human means and therefore the ways humans live. The future in these dystopian scenarios is filled with spaces for resistance, community values and proposals for new ways of living. But to carve out these new worlds, a discussion on what is human and what is not precedes to show that any new form society may take needs to challenge the assumptions of our present day world. In the selected novels, that include Ursula Le Guin’s The Telling, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, when those initially considered non-humans tell stories, they are perceived as humans. However, instead of integrating the previous human culture and reproducing its practices, these new humans propose other forms of humanity with other social arrangements, beliefs, gender configurations, and culture. They point to how humanity is a plural and open concept, not a restrictive ideal, and on the ways we can envision possible futures once a more plural meaning of the word human prevails. Throughout the article I discuss briefly the traditional humanist view on humanity, how it appears on dystopian fiction and how it is challenged, the many ways these ideas are present in the corpus selected and how they are explored and blurred. Finally, I divide the selected novels into three groups according to how the meaning of storytelling in the text challenges the notion of human.