Oryx and Crake Lesson Plan

Exercises in Problematics

Kind of Activity:

Group Work

Objective:

Students will be able to appreciate and respond to Margaret Atwood's expert wordplay

Common Core Standards:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.4

Structure:

By now students will surely have noticed Atwood has a lot of fun naming products and companies. "CorpSeCorps," for example, stands for Corporate Security Corps (prounounced "core"), but the first two words look an awful lot like the word "corpse"—a not-so-subtle nod to the Corps' brutality.

Allow students to form small groups. In groups, they should come up with lists of wordplay in Oryx and Crake. There are so many examples in the text, and students should...