Název: "That's not how we hang people here" : Gilead in the eyes of witnesses in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
Zdrojový dokument: Brno studies in English. 2022, roč. 48, č. 1, s. 187-200
Rozsah
187-200
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Trvalý odkaz (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2022-1-11
Trvalý odkaz (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.76865
Type: Článek
Jazyk
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Upozornění: Tyto citace jsou generovány automaticky. Nemusí být zcela správně podle citačních pravidel.
Abstrakt(y)
Witness and testimonial literature have gained special significance in the 20th century in response to the traumas that people experienced then. Two dystopian novels by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, are also classified as such, even though they are set in the fictitious Republic of Gilead in the near future. In both cases, the story is told by a first-person narrator, unreliable by default, but still able to bear witness to the events. In the first novel, the narrator is trapped by the circumstances, but still looking back to the pre-Gilead times. Her tale is her means of survival. In the second novel, the narrating voice is splintered into three distinct ones – one of the architects of the system, a girl raised in Gilead and an outsider, travelling south but unable to fully grasp the reality there. Once the four voices intertwine, the picture of the regime takes the form of her-story. The aim of the paper is to analyze the way in which the four narrators in the two novels perceive the regime and how they deal with the trauma.
eng
Reference
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[3] Atwood, Margaret (2006) Curious Pursuits. Occasional Writing. London: Virago Press.
[4] Atwood, Margaret (2017 [1985]) The Handmaid's Tale. London: Penguin Random House.
[5] Atwood, Margaret (2017) Margaret Atwood on what The Handmaid's Tale means in the age of Trump. The New York Times, March 10, 2017 [online]. Available at: https://www.ny-times.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html (Accessed: February 23, 2022).
[6] Atwood, Margaret (2019) The Testaments. London: Penguin Random House.
[7] Claeys, Gregory (2017) Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[8] Dolitsky, Marlene (1998) Characterizing the narrator: Narratee as alter ego. In: Lacroix, Jean-Michel and Jacques Leclaire (eds.) Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale/Le conte de la servante. The Power Game. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 101–116.
[9] Dopp, Jamie (1994) Subject-position as victim-position in The Handmaid's Tale. Studies in Canadian Literature, 19 (1), 43–57.
[10] Dvorak Marta (1998) What is real/reel? Margaret Atwood's "rearrangements of shapes on a flat surface," or narrative as collage. Etudes Anglaises 51 (4), 448–460.
[11] Dvorak, Marta (2021) Margaret Atwood's humor. In: Howells, Coral Ann (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 124–140. | DOI 10.1017/9781108626651.010
[12] Feldman, Lucy (2019) Let's break down the most mysterious parts of The Testaments, with a little help from Margaret Atwood. Time, Sep 10, 2019 [online]. Available at: https://time.com/5673535/the-testaments-plot-questions-margaret-atwood (Accessed: February 27, 2022).
[13] Feldman-Kołodziejuk, Ewelina (2020) The mothers, daughters, sisters. The intergenerational transmission of womanhood in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 17 (1) – Atwood at 80, 67–85. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1. | DOI 10.4312/elope.17.1.67-85
[14] Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psycho-analysis, and History. London and New York: Routledge.
[15] Gelfert, Axel (2014) A Critical Introduction to Testimony. London: Bloomsbury.
[16] Gheorghiu, Oana Celia and Michaela Praisler (2020) Rewriting politics, or the emerging fourth wave of feminism in Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 17 (1) – Atwood at 80, 87–96. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1. | DOI 10.4312/elope.17.1.87-96
[17] Greene, Michael (1999) Body/language in The Handmaid's Tale: Reading notes. In: Dvorak, Marta (ed.) Lire Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, PAGES. | DOI 10.4000/books.pur.30525
[18] Hedlin, Christine (2020) Five challenges from Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. The Cresset, LXXXIII (3), 18–23.
[19] Howells, Coral Ann (2020) Atwood's reinventions: So many Atwoods. ELOPE: English
[20] Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 17 (1) – Atwood at 80, 15–28. https:doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1
[21] Howells, Coral Ann (ed.) (2021) The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[22] Hutcheon, Linda (1988a) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.
[23] Hutcheon, Linda (1988b) The Canadian Postmodern. A Study of Contemporary English Canadian Fiction. Toronto, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. | DOI 10.4312/elope.17.1.9-11
[24] Labudová, Katarína (2020) Testimonies in The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Images of food in Gilead. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 17 (1) – Atwood at 80, 97–110. https:doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1
[25] LaCapra, Dominick (2014) Writing History, Writing Trauma. 2nd edition. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
[26] Ołtarzewska, Jagna (1999) Strategies for bearing witness: Testimony as construct in The Handmaid's Tale. In: Dvorak, Marta (ed.) Lire Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 47–57.
[27] Tolan, Fiona (2007) Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.