Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  3460. O’REGAN, Nadine. “Atwood’s Apocalypse.” Sunday Business Post 8 June 2003: s.l. Available from Lexis-Nexis. The author interviewed on the mezzanine floor of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.

  Atwood on awards: “Everyone should have some. Awards for all! Do you know that joke about the genie? A woman has been walking along a beach; she finds a bottle, rubs it, and the genie comes out. He says to the woman, ‘You can have any one wish you want.’ She says, ‘Oh good, in that case, I’ll wish for thin thighs.’ He says, ‘What? You could have wished for world peace, an end to famine, and you ask for thin thighs?’ She says, ‘Alright, let me think. I know, thin thighs for everyone!’ So, awards for everyone.”

  Atwood on Graeme Gibson, her partner: They never read each other’s work before it appears in published form. “What you want from your partner is tea and sympathy,” Atwood explains. “You want them to understand that the process is often difficult and makes you crabby, but I don’t think they should be in the position of having to say, ‘This is a real stinker!’ That should be your agent.” While At-wood is a Canadian national icon, Gibson, though well-known, has not succeeded on this scale.

  Has there ever been any jealousy or competitiveness between them? “No,” Atwood grins. “Why? Because this person is six foot four and gets the tops off jars.” Good answer. And, by all accounts, Atwood and Gibson are devoted to each other. When one American female novelist declared that “every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson,” Atwood delightedly wore the compliment on her tee shirt.

  3461. POTTS, Robert. “Light in the Wilderness: Margaret Atwood.” The Guardian (London) 26 April 2003: Section: Guardian Saturday Pages: 20. A profile of At-wood, largely biographical.

  3462. REHM, Diane. [Margaret] Atwood: Oryx and Crake. Washington, DC: WAMU, American University, 2003. 1 sound cassette (ca. 60 min.). Interview with Atwood originally broadcast on 13 May 2003 as part of the Diane Rehm Show.

  3463. RICHLER, Noah. “Atwood’s Ground Zero.” National Post 26 April 2003: Section: Spring Books: BK1, BK4. When asked what rules she set herself when writing a “speculative” fiction, Atwood replied: “You have to be able to back everything up with facts….I have a big, brown box in the cellar that is constantly being filled, except that I am collecting [these materials] even while I am writing…. Everything is filed….The genetic decoding of the SARS corona virus and the discovery of the autism gene. The nanotechnology that allows water to be extracted from air.”

  3464. ROBERTSON, Lloyd [anchor]. “The Race for Mayor in Toronto.” CTV News 6 November 2003. Available from Lexis-Nexis. Atwood and others interviewed about the race. A supporter of the eventual winner, David Miller who promised change, Atwood commented: “Things have been a little murky and grubby around the city for a while.”

  3465. RYAN, Laura T. “Defining Atwood.” The Post-Standard (Syracuse) 6 April 2003: Section: Stars: 21. Atwood interviewed by phone before her reading in Syracuse’s Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series.

  3466. ST. GERMAIN, Pat. “Peg Can’t Be Pegged: Atwood Defies Expectations.” Winnipeg Sun 24 September 2003: Section: Entertainment: 19. Atwood interviewed when in town for International Writers Festival.

  3467. STOFFMAN, Judy. “This Book Is Brought to You by the Letter R.” Toronto Star 13 September 2003: Section: Arts: J13. Interview with Atwood about Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes. “If Margaret Atwood’s mighty novels give you morbid migraines, don’t miss her mesmerizing manuscript for mini-readers, in which her mission is mainly mayhem and mischief. Also to massage the mood of her publisher Anna Porter by maybe making her millions.”

  3468. SULLIVAN, Jane. “Atwood’s Way with Words.” The Age (Melbourne) 29 November 2003: Section: Review: 3. Lots of stories, little lectures and jokes (2106 w). “Here’s one for you,” she says. “The devil agrees to show an author writers’ heaven and writers’ hell. He opens a door and there’s a huge room full of desks with computers. At each desk sits a writer, writing, knocking back coffee and wine, smoking, having writer’s block, nervous breakdowns. ‘Oh,’ says the author, ‘this must be writers’ hell.’ Then the devil shows him another room, full of desks with computers: ‘This is writers’ heaven.’ At each desk sits a writer, writing, knocking back coffee and wine, smoking, having writer’s block, nervous break-downs….‘What’s the difference?’ screams the author. ‘Ah,’ says the devil, ‘these are the published writers.’” Atwood allows herself a brief, fiendish chuckle.

  Scholarly Resources

  3469. ADAMS, Robert. A Love of Reading: The Second Collection—More Reviews of Contemporary Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. Chapter 1 (1-17) is an analysis of Alias Grace.

  3470. ALMEIDA, Léila. “As meninas más na literatura de Margaret Atwood e Lucía Etxebarría.” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 25 (2003). Available at http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/ (1 May 2006). (Universidad Complutense de Madrid).

  3471. ALMONTE, Richard. “Posthumous Praise: Biographical Influence in Canadian Literature (Susanna Moodie, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Pat Lowther, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood).” PhD thesis. McMaster University, 2003. 250 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (2004). This dissertation explores the phenomenon whereby a number of deceased Canadian women writers have had their lives utilized in subsequent works of fiction, drama, poetry, film, and biography. Includes study of The Blind Assassin. For more see DAI-A 65.01 (July 2004): 148.

  3472. ARBOR, Joy. “Margaret Atwood 1939– .” American Writers—A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement XIII: Edward Abbey to William Jay Smith. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. 19-39.

  3473. BARNARD, Anette. “Margaret Atwood: Challenging the Unity of the Body and the Text.” MA thesis. Potchefstroom University of Christian Higher Education [South Africa], 2003. 120 pp.

  3474. BERAN, Carol L. “Strangers within the Gates: Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. 74-87. “Examines how At-wood’s strangers in Wilderness Tips push readers toward becoming the creative nonvictims of Survival….” from Introduction, xiv.

  3475. BORK, Carol Denise. “The Narrative in Suspense: Women at the Intersection of Feminism and Postmodernism in the Late-Twentieth-Century Novel.” PhD thesis. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey–New Brunswick, 2003. “This project identifies and explores ‘the narrative in suspense—a postmodernist feminist fictional form that dismantles the conventional ‘marriage or death’ formula of Anglo-American novelistic discourse to posit new, less constraining structural and thematic roles for women in the novel. While some novelists and theorists respond to what Jean-François Lyotard calls the ‘postmodern...incredulity toward metanarra-tives’ with a sense of despair or meaninglessness, I contend that we can also find optimism in the plurality of provisional narratives that characterize the ‘postmodern condition.’…My reading of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle demonstrates that narrative itself—the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories that are told about us—informs perceptions of self and reality, and thus the postmodern local narrative can be deployed to reconfigure women’s experiences.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 64.06 (December 2003): 2092.

  3476. BOUSON, J. Brooks. “A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.” Critique 44.3 (2003): 251-271.

  3477. BUSBY, Brian John. Character Parts: Who’s Really Who in CanLit. Toronto: A. A. Knopf Canada, 2003. Includes top half of Atwood’s face on its dust jacket (along with bottom half of Mordecai Richler’s). The real-life persons behind characters in Cat’s Eye, The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Negotiating with the Dead, The Robber Bride, as well as in shorter pieces “In Search of Rattlesnake Plantain,” “Isis in Darkness,” and finally “Uncles.”

  3478. CHARRERON, Elodie. “Resistance in Volker Schlondorff’s Adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handma
id’s Tale.” MS thesis. Université de Poitiers. 2003. 132 pp.

  3479. CHILTON, Myles. “Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Toronto as the Urban Non-Place.” The Image of the City in Literature, Media, and Society. Ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, 2003. 154-160.

  3480. CUDER, Pilar. Margaret Atwood: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003. 86 pp.

  3481. DANIELS, Margaret J., and Heather E. BOWEN. “Feminist Implications of Anti-Leisure in Dystopia Fiction.” Journal of Leisure Research 35.4 (2003): 423-440. “This essay provides a feminist perspective on dystopian anti-leisure. Dystopias are futuristic anti-utopias where leisure is distorted and individuals are manipulated to further the agenda of the politically powerful….The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how women in dystopian societies are subjected to anti-leisure as evidenced by the devaluation of their personal leisure spaces. A feminist definition of leisure is used to guide a poststructuralist feminist analysis of four dystopian novels: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and George Orwell’s 1984. Synopsis and discussion are then employed to demonstrate how two binary oppositions of female disempowerment are evidenced in the novels and to consider how these same forces operate in reality to jeopardize women’s personal leisure spaces.” (Author).

  3482. DYMOND, Erica Joan. “Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Explicator 61.3 (2003): 181-183.

  3483. FAND, Roxanne J. “Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Dialogic Novel of a Nietzschean Fairy Tale.” Critique 45.1 (Fall 2003): 65-81.

  3484. FORD, Susan Allen. “Teaching Contemporary Female Gothic: Murdoch, Carter, Atwood.” Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. 177-183. Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and Atwood’s Lady Oracle.

  3485. FU, Jun. Magelite Atewude yan jiu = Margaret Atwood and Her Writing. Nanjing Shi: Yi lin chu ban she, 2003. 440 pp. In Chinese. Title romanized.

  3486. GARCIA, Jennifer Renee. “Popularizing Feminist Politics: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Feminism, and Popular Culture. MA thesis. University of Texas at El Paso, 2003. 109 pp. For more see MAI 43.02 (April 2005): 401.

  3487. GAULT, Cinda. “Female and National Identities: Laurence, Atwood, and Engel, 1965-1980.” PhD thesis. York University (ON), 2003. 325 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (2004). “[In examining Atwood, I note] that her fiction sparked controversy among critics, who were confused about whether or not her endings were to be understood as happy. The predominant conclusion among her contemporaries was that they were to be read this way, thus extending hope that female and national identities might eventually be workable. I explore a consistently realist interpretation to ascertain what other meanings might be possible if these characters and plots are seen as displaced from mythic narrative patterns to the point where meaning shifts from successful identity quests to explanations of characters and events in terms of social forces. Attempts to resolve social contradictions can be understood not only through utopian pictures of resolved identity, as would be expected in romance, but also through realist portrayals of the historical forces producing particular people in particular circumstances. Mythic story patterns suggest more optimistic expectations of identity success than do those narrative conventions that give a sense of verisimilitude. In the latter instance, realist solutions contribute to a vision of what an individual character needs to do to resolve a social contradiction.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 65.01 (July 2004): 149.

  3488. GREGERSDOTTER, Katarina. “Watching Women, Falling Women: Power and Dialog in Three Novels by Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. Umeå universitet, Insti-tutionen för moderna språk, 2003. 190 pp. On Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, and The Robber Bride.

  3489. HAMMILL, Faye. “‘Death by Nature’: Margaret Atwood and Wilderness Gothic.” Gothic Studies 5.2 November (2003): 47-63. “Recent criticism has increasingly asserted the centrality of gothic in the Canadian canon, and explicitly gothic conceptions of the forested and frozen North inform several of Margaret Atwood’s novels, poems, essays and short stories. Her haunted wilderness settings are sites for the negotiation of identity and power relationships. This essay focuses on her 1970 poem sequence The Journals of Susanna Moodie and her short story ‘Death by Landscape’ (from her 1991 Wilderness Tips collection), considering them in relation to critical models of postcolonial gothic.” (Author).

  3490. ______. Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760-2000. New York; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. See especially Chapter 6, “Forest and ‘Fairy Stuff’: Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips,” 135-166, and Chapter 7, “Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and ‘That Moodie Bitch,’” 167-203. Chapter 7 is based on an article with the same title published in American Review of Canadian Studies 29 (1999): 67-91.

  3491. HENGEN, Shannon. “Strange Visions: Atwood’s Interlunar and Technopoetics.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. 42-53. “Suggests that Interlu-nar marks a conclusion to the poetry volumes preceding it but still presents a changed perspective, a ‘stranger vision.’…” from Introduction, xiv.

  3492. HOLMLUND Mona, and Gail YOUNGBERG. Inspiring Women: A Celebration of Herstory. Regina, SK: Coteau Books, 2003. See especially “Margaret Atwood.” 234. An inaccurate profile. By 2003, Atwood had, for example, published more than “two novels.”

  3493. HOWELLS, Carol [sic] Ann. “The Robber Bride; or Who Is a True Canadian?” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. 88-101. “Reading The Robber Bride as a postcolonial novel, Coral Ann Howells suggests…that the novel is part of Atwood’s ongoing inquiry into Canadian identity, a means of ‘narrating the nation.’…” from Introduction, xiv.

  3494. HOWELLS, Coral Ann. Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction: Refiguring Identities. New York; Basingstoke [UK]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. See especially Chapter 2, “‘Don’t Ever Ask for the True Story’: Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin,” 25-52.

  3495. ______. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. Harlow: Longman, 2003. 136 pp. York notes.

  3496. ______. “Sites of Desolation.” Entering the Labyrinth: Writing The Blind Assassin. Ed. Gerry Turcotte. Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press, 2003. 31-46.

  3497. HUDGINS, Christopher C. “Harold Pinter’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Freedom, Prison, and a Hijacked Script.” Captive Audience: Prison and Captivity in Contemporary Theater. Ed. Thomas Fahy and Kimball King. New York: Routledge, 2003. 81-108.

  3498. HUTCHISON, Lorna. “The Book Reads Well: Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Middle Voice.” Pacific Coast Philology 38 (2003): 40-59.

  3499. INGERSOLL, Earl. “Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Studies in the Novel 35.4 (2003): 543-559.

  3500. JENAINATI, Cathia. “Narrating the Self: Memory as Narrative Strategy in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of Warwick, 2003. “The dissertation investigates the utilisation of memory as a narrative strategy in the fiction of Margaret Atwood. It is structured in four chapters. The Introduction provides the rationale for my research and establishes the critical framework within which I intend to analyse Atwood’s novels. The subsequent chapters build up an overall argument demonstrating that Atwood utilises memory as a narrative strategy in order to illustrate the female protagonist’s quest for individuation.” (Author).

  3501. JONES, Dorothy. “Narrative Enclosures.” Entering the Labyrinth: Writing The Blind Assassin. Ed. Gerry Turcotte. Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press, 2003. 47-67. Imprisonment as an Atwood theme, especially in The Blind Assassin.

  3502. KIM, Youngmin. �
��The Experimental Spirit in Canadian Poetry: Margaret Atwood, Eli Mandel, George Bowering, and the Experimental Poets Thereafter.” Journal of English Language and Literature / Yomgo Yongmunhak 49.4 (Winter 2003): 755-780.

  3503. KIRTZ, Mary K. “(Dis)Unified Field Theories: The Clarendon Lectures Seen Through (a) Cat’s Eye.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. 54-73. “Examines both Atwood’s representation and transformation of the myth of the malevolent north….” from Introduction, xiv.

  3504. KLICK, Donna M. “Open Endings and Questionable Liberation in Margaret At-wood’s Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale.” MA thesis. State University of New York–Brockport, 2003. 83 pp.

  3505. LAWN, Jenny. “Born Under the Sign of Joan: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Mommie Dearest, and the Uses of Maternal Ambivalence.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 5.1 (Spring-Summer 2003): 33-44.

  3506. LINTON, Michael. “The Bigot’s Opera.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion & Public Life 137 (November 2003): 14-17. Comments on the moral questions about The Handmaid’s Tale, an opera by Danish composer Poul Ruders based on Atwood’s novel.

  3507. LONG, Maureen Eleanor. “Food, Sex, Death, and Quest: The Literary Legacy of Sir John Franklin.” MA thesis. University of Alaska, 2003. Examines Franklin’s influence on a variety of authors, including Atwood as reflected in her short story “The Age of Lead.”

  3508. MacFARLANE, Susan. “Living on: Survival.” Open Letter (Canada) (11th series) 8 (2003): 73-86.

  3510. MAUS, Jessica Rene. “The Role of Text in the Metaphysical Detective Story.” MA thesis. University of Alaska Anchorage, 2003. 107 pp. The metaphysical detective story may be defined as a text that raises profound ontological and episte-mological questions, and this thesis will elaborate on its characteristics and themes, particularly as those themes relate to the role, definition and use of texts. More specifically, the role of texts and how the use of real events and historical documents alter the ontological and epistemological questions these novels raise are examined….Chapter Two analyzes the relationship between literary and historical documents in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” (Author). For more see MAI 41.06 (December 2003): 1587.