Contemporary Approaches Flashcards
What does Coral Ann Howells suggest about Atwood’s choice of narrator?
She argues that Atwood’s ‘choice of a female narrator turns the traditionally masculine dystopian genre upside down’.
What does J. Brooks Bouson write about Atwood’s presentation of femininity?
Bouson says Atwood presents femininity as a construct and how she subversively ‘unpicks the fantasy of romantic love’.
What does Corall Ann Howells refer to as Offred’s ‘one central traumatic memory’ with ‘jagged edges’?
Offred’s failed escape with Luke and their daughter, it is recalled and re-imagines on several occasions.
What does Pilar Somacarrera write about The Handmaid’s Tale and Focault’s ‘docile bodies’?
Somacarrera writes that ‘given that The Handmaid’s Tale depicts the quintessential disciplinary society where power is brought to the most minute and distant elements, Foucault’s model can be applied to almost all of its aspects’.
How does Heidi Macpherson describe the way the Republic of Gilead functions?
She describes it as ‘overt mechanisms for control, fear of betrayal and inculcated self-surveillance’.
How does Commi S. Vevaina describe Pieixoto?
Vevaina describes Pieixoto as ‘interested in reconstructing his grand impersonal narrative of a nation’s history’ and comments that Offred’s ‘narrative status diminishes considerably in Pieixoto’s reconstruction of her story’.
