The Two Cultures Debate Revisited in the Posthumanist Age: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as a Case Study
The Two Cultures Debate Revisited in the Posthumanist Age: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as a Case Study

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s first novel in the MaddAddam Trilogy, Oryx and Crake as a counter-example of the healthy development of the future higher education and argues that future university education should integrate science and humanities to cultivate both scientifically-savvy and empathetic citizens. Starting from the ‘two cultures’ debate that British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow launched in 1959, the essay looks into the breakdown of communication between scientists and humanities intellectuals as a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. The dire consequences of the division between sciences and the humanities, with the former overpowering the latter, are vividly shown in Oryx and Crake. As the two cultures debate raises the most profound question about the direction of academic education and Atwood’s novel highlights science’s repercussions on the fate of human beings and posthumans, the article engages with the two cultures motif and proposes an analysis of the structure of feeling in Oryx and Crake to reveal how profit-driven techno-capitalism fails to cultivate empathetic citizens. The first part reflects on the relevance of the two cultures controversy to today’s situation. The second part analyses the fictional world’s dominant belief that facilitates individuals’ character development and the third part focuses on Crake’s affective responses that result from such cultural ambience. The article considers Oryx and Crake a cautionary tale and argues that we should transcend the tendency of regarding the two cultures in binary opposition, so that intellectuals could more powerfully address new challenges.

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