ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This study aims to suggest the affirmative vitalist posthuman ethics in the ways that the survivors after a apocalypse, Toby and Ren change the direction of environmental imagination in the process of building their resilient lives in Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. Atwood tells a interwoven story of two female survivors from the pandemic disaster, the pre-members of an eco-religious group God's Gardeners, as they base their recollections on the adaptive practice at a post-apocalyptic world. This novel allows to explore the ecological imagination from a materialist posthuman perspective as the characters continue to work on adaptation for the survival. This novel gives the readers the insights of environmental imagination in the ecological work during climate change when they show a sense of survival through the relationship between humans and non-humans. This novel proposes a posthuman bioethics through the process that they restore a life-oriented society by developing a post-anthropocentric eco-consciousness, basing on the values and lifestyles of the Gardeners. For the sustainable development, this novel calls for abandoning the current consumerism and anthropocentric ontology by offering the dissolution and transformation of environmental imagination in Toby's story. The possibility of survival can be found when it is oriented toward relationships beyond the dichotomous boundary line. Deep interest in all life, respect for the more-than human, and a sense of relationship to global ecosystems could offer solutions to adjustment and adaptation to resilient ecosystems. This novel suggests that our adaptation processes are inevitable along with scientific efforts to slow the climate change in the zoe/geo/techno frame, and the vitalist posthuman ethics could be realized through the practices of life-oriented imagination, relationality between humans and non-humans, awareness of otherness, and communal cooperation.

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