Narrative Knowledge as Alternative in Twenty-First-Century Dystopian Novels Written by Women

Abstract

In novels such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, narrative knowledge, meaning the one structured from folk tales, creates democratic spaces that allows a non-excluding notion of humanity to develop. Narrative knowledge is presented as a counterpoint to the restrictive totalizing vision of capitalist scientific thought and allows that the protagonists of the mentioned novels to affirm themselves, their cultures and their communities in a way that new forms of living are possible. Far from being treaties against science, these dystopian narratives rescue the importance of dialogue among differing forms of knowledge so that humanity encompasses, in fact, all humans and not only specific groups. Considering the works of Jean-François Lyotard, Ailton Krenak and Sandra Harding, this paper aims at discussing how these novels question the nature of knowledge and propose more plural forms of facing the world. In these dystopias of violence and poverty, narrative knowledge is what opens space to the utopian horizon and to the future of a less unequal future.