3843. HOOVER, Bob. “Atwood Sounds Off on American Reality.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 22 January 2005: Section: Arts & Entertainment: C6. Atwood interviewed prior to her visit to Pittsburgh. In the interview, she emphasized the growing differences between Canada and the United States and the importance of writers keeping their independence from authorities.
3844. HUY, Minh Tran. “Les mondes perdus de Margaret Atwood.” Magazine Littéraire 441 (April 2005): 92-92. An interview focussing on Le dernier homme (Oryx and Crake).
3845. LITTLE, Melanie. “Mythic Revisions: Margaret Atwood Rewrites the Story of Penelope.” Calgary Herald 22 October 2005: Section: Books & The Arts: K1. Atwood interviewed when visiting Calgary’s Wordfest Festival about The Penelo-piad.
3846. MacDONALD, Marianne. “Sweet Subversive.” National Post 4 June 2005: Section: Weekend Post: WP5. Atwood interviewed in Dublin on her boyish early years in the bush, feminism (whatever that is), marriage, and the writing life.
3847. PETROWSKI, Nathalie. “Margaret Atwood: La fin du monde est à quelle heure?” La Presse 17 April 2005: Section: Arts spectacles: 1. An interview conducted in English but reported in French. Atwood didn’t like the translation of Oryx and Crake into French as Le dernier homme but claimed no expertise in translation. If she had been left to translate Surfacing into German, speakers of that language would have thought the book dealt with submarines. Atwood also participated in the interviewer’s quick quiz: Last film: Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp; last CD: The new Martha Wainwright album; last book: The History of Attila the Hun; most disturbing work: Vera Drake, a film by Mike Leigh about an abortionist in Britain during the 1950s; most inspiring artist: Mozart or Kafka; who would she be if she were a city: London, which she loves, or Aix-en-Provence, a bourgeois city which she resembles; if she lived in another era, where would it be: Ancient Egypt; who would she be if she could be a fictional character: Elizabeth Bennett, from Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice. (1275 w).
3848. ROBINSON, David. “The Truth about Myths.” The Scotsman 29 October 2005: 6. Atwood interviewed at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
On getting involved with the Myths series: “With me, it was…at the [Edinburgh] Book Festival, at Channings, the hotel I was staying in—and before breakfast, when I say yes to everything. But I’d known of Canongate when we’d lived in Edinburgh in 1978-79, and I liked the books like The Assassin’s Cloak that Ja-mie’d [Byng] been publishing, and in any case with my own background in Canada I was conditioned to support small publishers. Then he won the Booker with Life of Pi and I wondered why I’d bothered!”
On why she wanted to write about The Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus’s wife Penelope—and particularly that of her 12 maids, who were all hanged when the conquering hero returned to Ithaca. There were, she suggests, a few possible reasons—their deaths might have been honor killings, or to prevent them revealing Penelope’s infidelities with the suitors occupying Odys-seus’s palace at Ithaca, or the whole story might have had a wider, mythic meaning. Atwood: “When I read about the hanged maids, I thought, there’s something wrong here. Those maids were left dangling at the end of The Odyssey in such an unjust way. Even when I was 15, I thought that. I noticed that even when the BBC read The Odyssey on the radio, they left out the story of the maids. James Joyce didn’t put them into Ulysses either. It’s because there’s this guy in the story that we’ve quite liked up to now and then he hangs the maids....”
On the creative process: “In a book I wrote called Negotiating with the Dead, I wanted to write about writing and what writers think they are doing when they’re doing it. I started by giving all the motives I’d ever come across and by asking other writers for theirs, and looking at prologues from the past. There was no common factor. So I said to novelists, ‘What does it feel like when you’re going into a book?’ And they all said, it’s dark, like going into a dark room—as Virginia Woolf said, going there with a lamp and lighting up the furniture—but they all mentioned darkness followed by light, every single one. You have to go into the dark and muck around in there. Maybe you will succeed, maybe you won’t, but unless you go into the dark, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for. My version of that is going to sleep and often—and many people will say this—in the morning it will be there. That’s all I can tell you. With this book, I woke up and it was there, the first sentence in the book. And you think ‘Who am I hearing here?’ Well, I knew who it was, so writing the book afterwards was like skiing downhill. But there’s a lot of false starts in the labyrinth. Creative people usually can’t tell you where they get their ideas from— they’re not working with logos.”
3849. SEAMAN, Donna. Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2005. See especially “Margaret Atwood.” 93-106. From an interview conducted in 2003, the focus of which was Oryx and Crake.
3850. TONKIN, Brad. “Old Myths, New Truths.” The Independent 28 October 2005: Section: Features: 2-4. With a focus on The Penelopiad. Evidently Atwood “made two false starts on other legendary yarns before settling on Penelope—one a native American story, the other the Norse myth about the creation of humanity out of two logs of wood. ‘But I couldn’t get the logs of wood animated.’”
3851. TURPIN, Adrian. “Nothing Darker Than the Truth.” Sunday Times 21 August 2005: Section: Features: 5. Atwood interviewed by phone in Toronto before coming to Edinburgh Book Festival and after arriving from an Arctic trip. Some excerpts: “You can tell a lot about a writer’s state of mind by what they’re reading. On Atwood’s bedside table is The Return of the Black Death, which argues that the illness that swept Europe in the 14th century was not bubonic plague, but a haem-orrhagic virus, more like ebola. (‘It could so easily happen again,’ Atwood says, almost breezily.) Before that she has finished books about William the Conqueror, Attila the Hun, and Genghis Khan. Atwood seems to thrive on the idea of civilisations threatened by forces barely within their control.”
Would she describe herself as a pessimist? “‘No pessimist is a pessimist,’ she replies. ‘They all say what I’m about to say. I’m a realist. If I was a pessimist, why would I write? Graeme is much more pessimistic than I am. Besides him, I’m little Mary Sunshine….’ The voice on the phone line from Toronto is a low, warm, almost sleepy drawl. I was expecting to be intimidated, I say.”
What went wrong? “Sometimes I do the ‘Oh she’s so scary’ thing in interviews, and sometimes it’s the ‘Margaret Atwood, she’s not so scary after all.’ It keeps the variety,” she adds dryly. [She also noted] “I’m working on poetry at the moment....What I’m really trying to do, though, is talk myself out of the next berserk novel.”
3852. VAN HERK, Aritha. “A Practical Sibyl: Margaret Atwood Is Eerily Adept at Predicting the Future.” Calgary Herald 15 October 2005: Section: Books & The Arts: F1. Interview before Atwood accepted the Banff Centre National Arts Award. Some examples of the topics covered:
On Canadian literature: “I don’t like speaking for a whole generation, but I have witnessed enormous changes in Canadian books....All of the things we writers once wished for, we now have. Book tours, readings in bookstores, lots of publicity. It started in coffee houses, the beatnik era, candles in Chianti bottles, and black walls. It wasn’t romantic—but grotty. And now, I am inclined to say be careful what you wish for. Those book tours and readings aren’t always fun.”
On academics: “One of the beautiful things about scholarship is that it is interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It’s not going to help you build a better mousetrap, although it may have a lot to say about the history of the mousetrap. I like watching somebody’s well-wrought argument twitching on the page.”
On quotidian advice: “Don’t build on flood plains. Use a low-energy washing machine.”
On sorting her clothing by color: “Then you can find things easily and things match. Blacks go on the left and pinks and whites on the right. I like that rainbow arrangement. People ought to
wear colour. It gives the rest of us something to look at. People should be visually varied to entertain the random eye of the passerby.”
Scholarly Resources
3853. ARIAS DOBLAS, Rosario. “Talking with the Dead: Revisiting the Victorian Past and the Occult in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Sarah Waters’s Affinity.” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense (EIUC) 13 (2005): 85-105.
3854. AZAR-LUXTON, Grizéll. “Margaret Atwood: Prize-Winning Novelist.” Cape Librarian 49.6 (November-December 2005): 23-26. An introduction to Atwood and her work.
3855. BARZILAI, Shuli. “The Bluebeard Syndrome in Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Fear and Femininity.” Marvels & Tales 19.2 (16 November 2005): 249-273. “The multiple identities of Joan Foster in Lady Oracle are the by-products of many literary and social models. Joan exists partly as a central narrative agent and partly as a nexus or repository of language and culture. At stake, however, is something more than an authorial display of postmodernist temperament and virtuosity. The intricate weave of the Bluebeard syndrome into the heterogeneous narratives that constitute Lady Oracle dramatizes the complex exchanges between popular culture and the reality of women’s lives. Atwood explores the unsettling transpositions between literary and literal romance, on the one hand, and between imagined and experienced aggression against women, on the other.” (Author).
3856. BIDIVILLE, Annick. “Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman: From Body Representations to Feminist Theories.” Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society 34 (Fall 2005): 4-15.
3857. BLACKFORD, Holly. “Haunted Housekeeping: Fatal Attractions of Servant and Mistress in Twentieth-Century Female Gothic Literature.” Literature Interpretation Theory 16.2 (April-June 2005): 233-261. “In 20th-century female gothic stories, women of different backgrounds struggle for possession of households. This possession is vital to female authenticity and desire. Houses, signifying domestic function, are substitutes for uncaring or persecuting husbands, whose attentions both mistress and servant seek. The intimacy and competition between mistress and servant represents the degree to which protagonists and gothic authors articulate ambiguity about awakening sexual desire in young women. In their struggles with servants, young protagonists struggle with themselves and the question of whether domestic ideology truly makes female desire productive and palatable. In this context, the following works are examined: Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, Shirley Jackson’s novel Hill House, and Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace.” (Author).
3858. BOWERING, George. Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing. Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2005. See especially Chapter [15], “Atwood’s Hook,” 157-172. On the short Atwood poem “You Fit into Me like a Hook,” according to Bowering: “You belong; you hurt like hell.”
3859. DiMARCO, Danette. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: Homo Faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 41.2 (Spring 2005): 170-195. “Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) critiques modernity’s commitment to homo faber—he who labors to use every instrument as a means to achieve a particular end in building a world, even when the fabrication of that world necessarily demands a repeated violation of its materiality, including its people. Atwood propels her novel through the memories of the main character, Snowman, a survivor of a deadly viral pathogen created and unleashed by his best friend, Crake. Too much a product of a profit-driven world who mirrors its economy of self-interest, Crake emerges as the quintessential homo faber, making it unlikely that any kind of positive social change will happen directly through him.” (Author).
3860. DUNNING, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 86-101. “The article examines how the novel…warns against pursuing a purportedly therapeutic scientific project and insists that sacred narrative cannot be excised without the loss of humanity. Atwood is able to capture modernity’s ethos and portray its potential for disaster as depicted in the novel.” (Journal).
3861. EVANS, Shari Michelle. “Navigating Exile: Contemporary Women Writers Discover an Ethics of Home.” PhD thesis. University of New Mexico, 2005. 266 pp. “This dissertation examines the reformulation of home-spaces in recent novels by Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler. My work conceives of home as an active, dynamic space where multiple ideologies, imaginations and material realities engage one another. Because women have historically been controlled and condemned by the tyrannies of domestic space and of racial and gendered constructions, women writers have turned to exile as a site of freedom. Against the conventions of domestic space, Atwood, Morrison and Butler construct home in an ethics that creates and practices amorphous, inclusive, and changing community.…In Oryx and Crake, Atwood investigates the possibility that we are already exiled because we have destroyed both imagination and community leaving us with the hope that we still have enough imagination to respond to aesthetic pleasure and invent ethical practices.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 66.06 (December 2005): 2209.
3862. FLEITZ, Elizabeth J. “Troubling Gender: Bodies, Subversion, and the Mediation of Discourse in Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” MA thesis. Bowling Green State University, 2005. 66 pp. Available as .pdf file from Electronic Theses and Dissertations from OhioLINK member universities: http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/.
3863. GOLDMAN, Marlene. Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, ©2005. See especially Chapter 3, “Margaret Atwood’s ‘Hairball’: Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction,” 83-100.
3864. HAMMILL, Faye. “Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale.” A Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. David Seed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 522-533.
3865. HAROLD, James. “Narrative Engagement with Atonement and The Blind Assassin.” Philosophy & Literature 29.1 (April 2005): 130-145. “Two recent novels, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, are philosophically instructive. These books are interesting, I argue, because they reveal something about understanding and appreciating narrative. They show us that audience’s participation in narrative is much more subtle and complex than philosophers generally acknowledge. An analysis of these books reveals that narrative imagining is not static or unified, but dynamic and multipolar. I argue that once the complexity of narrative engagement is better understood, some prominent philosophical problems and debates concerning narrative dissolve.” (Author).
3866. HORNER, Avril, and Sue ZLOSNIK. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Houndmills; Basingstoke; Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. See especially Chapter 5, “Women Writing Women,” 116-135, which includes some discussion of the gothic in Lady Oracle, Surfacing, and The Robber Bride.
3867. HOWELLS, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmil-lan, 2005. “The second edition is thoroughly revised and updated and includes four new chapters covering Atwood’s recent novels, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, her 2002 book on writing, Negotiating with the Dead, and her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, published in 2003.” (Publisher).
3868. JOHNSON, Kristyn. “Othering the Woman’s War.” MA thesis. St. Bonaventure University, 2005. 85 pp. A study of The Edible Woman, as well as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar plus the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Ursula K. Le Guin.
3869. KELLY, Sarah M. “Tracing the Transition to Empire in Feminist Fiction.” MA thesis. Villanova University, 2005. 64 pp. Atwood’s Surfacing set against Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Karen Tei’s Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange.
3870. KUHN, Cynthia G. Self-Fashioning in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: Dress, Culture, and Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Contents: “‘Clothed in Words’: Margaret Atwood and Dress.” “Border Crossing: Dress as Performative Boundary and Margin.” “Toxic Chic: Dress and Dreams in The Robber Bride.” “Amazing Space: Veils and Vogues in Alias Grace.” “Style and Text(ile): A Conclusion.”
3871. LABUDOVÁ, Katarína. “From Ret
rospective to Reconstruction of the ‘Auto/ Biographical’ Subject in Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood.” Theory and Practice in English Studies: Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies. Vol. 4. Ed. Jan Chovanec. Brno: Masaryk University, 2005. 109-114.
3872. LIN, Michelle Hoefahn. “‘Only the Blind Are Free’: Sight and Blindness in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” MA thesis. North Carolina State University, 2005. 92 pp. Available in .pdf from http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-03292005-142653/unrestricted/etd.pdf.
3873. MacDONALD, Tanis Louise. “The Daughter’s Consolation: Melancholia and Subjectivity in Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies.” PhD thesis. University of Victoria (Canada), 2005. 249 pp. “This study investigates the redefinition of female filial piety and the negotiations of female subjectivity in paternal elegies written by Canadian women. It sets Freud’s theory of the work of mourning against the potential for a ‘work of melancholia’ in order to read the elegies as inquiries into the rhetoric of mourning as it is complicated by father-daughter kinship. Examining poetic texts by P. K. Page, Jay MacPherson, Margaret Atwood, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré, this study considers these ‘daughterly elegies’ as literary artifacts that adopt politicized subjectivities that grow from the poets’ investigation into the function and limitations of elegiac convention.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 66.10 (April 2006).
3874. MASSOURA, Kiriaki, and Mark GARNER. “A Language Is Everything You Do: The Reflective Self in an Autobiographical Narrative.” Journal of Language and Literature 4 (2005): 1-19. Available online: http://www.jllonline.net. “On At-wood’s Surfacing analysed through the social-psychological concept of Reflective Self Function.” (Author).
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