English 465-002
Women Writers: Margaret Atwood: The Novel
Instr: Tatham, Cam
Office: CRT 392; 229-3504
e-mail: ctatham@uwm.edu
Office Hours: T&R; 10:00-11:00am
Course Information: T&&R; 11:00am-12:15pm; CRT 368
Course Description
Texts:
Bodily Harm
The Handmaid's Tale
Cat's Eye
The Robber Bride
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin
Oryx and Crake
Requirements: Assigned reading. Regular attendance (no more than three cuts allowed without final grade being lowered). Participation in discussion.
Written work: Journal in which you record your reactions to each text, to class discussion, and to the various ways in which the texts and discussions intersect with your own experience. You are expected to write a minimum of 2-3 pages, single-spaced per week. You may submit selections from your journal to the Discussion Forum (see below) to fulfill that requirement. Journals to be handed in for feedback as indicated in the syllabus; all written work must be handed in by the last class.
Participation in the Discussion Forum: this is an online discussion site (Blackboard) in which you are expected to participate at least twice a week. You may post entries from your journal; at least one posting must be in response to the posting of a classmate.
Policies: Late work will be penalized. Incompletes will not be given except in the case of documented medical emergencies.
Grades: Your final grade will be determined as follows: participation in class discussion (10%), Discussion Forum participation (20%), Journal (70%).
Content: Among the issues we will be discussing as we trace Atwood's development through her novels will be the following:
- Atwood's advocacy for Canadian literature, as well as her sense that 'Canada' is a psychological as well as a geographical space, one she often associates with the complex relationship between the 'victim' who colludes in her/his own victimization and the 'victimizer' who is typically unaware of his/her own power games.
- Atwood's uneasy relationship with 'feminism.'Atwood's evolving exploration of relationships: between women, between women and men, between mothers and children.
- Atwood's vision of the artist, as well as her aesthetics and her technical experiments with her craft.
- Atwood's constant concern with the power of language - as well as with its necessary (even vitalizing) limitations - and its interfacing with the mute but demanding desires of the body and the concrete, physical world.
- Atwood's probing of the terms of what might count as a viable morality/ethics in the modern world. (In a recent poem she notes, "The facts of this world seen clearly / are seen through tears; / why tell me then / there is something wrong with my eyes? Is the tragic vision always truest?)
- As well as whatever issues we draw out of our readings, which will necessarily be precisely as particular as the multiplicities of the class - backgrounds, ages, work experiences, present and past (and hoped for) relationships, genders, races - many differences brought to the conversation must inevitably generate multiple reading we cannot predict but shall experience.
- Graduate students will be expected to write a paper, as well as keep the journal, a paper in which they should explore what they find are the advantages and disadvantages of using one specific critical approach as applied to Atwood's novels. Approaches like, say, deconstruction, French feminism, American feminism, reader response, a specifically Foucauldian or Barthesian reading, perhaps. A rhizomatic reading via Deleuze and Guatari. Or just about any critical approach that interests you and which you suspect might be interesting to view Atwood, at least in part, through its lenses.
