Language’s influence on control and rebellion in Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale"

Language’s influence on control and rebellion in Margaret Atwood’s
Author: Ronja Thiede
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 26
Release: 2019-05-27
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3668948348

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, language: English, abstract: Overall, Atwood utilized Gilead’s oppressive manipulation of language in "The Handmaid’s Tale" to reveal the hierarchical dynamics of power in the theocratic state. Therefore, it is vital to determine in how far Gilead’s discourse is used to maintain the existing power structures, but also whether, and if so, in how far it is used to offer resistance against the state’s rigid hierarchy. Therefore, it will first be analyzed what Gilead’s social structure looks like, before the highly original thoughts of Pierre Bourdieu on the relations among language, power and politics will be introduced to facilitate a real understanding of the correlation of language and power. After that, a closer look at the concrete content of the novel and particular text passages will give an insight into how the Gileadean power structures are maintained through the use of language. Following this, it will then be analyzed how language also enables Gilead’s opponents, in general, but mainly, the novel’s first-person narrator Offred, in particular, to offer resistance. Therefore, it will first be described how the coexistence of two discourses can be a threat to the system, before it will be dealt with Offred’s main means of resistance: her storytelling.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2011-09-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0771008791

An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

Lire Margaret Atwood

Lire Margaret Atwood
Author: Marta Dvorak
Publisher: Rennes [France] : Presses universitaires de Rennes
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1999
Genre: Canadian literature
ISBN:

Ce recueil bilingue consacré à l'écrivain canadien Margaret Atwood, reconnue comme l'une des figures dominantes de la littérature d'expression anglaise, contient l'intervention qu'elle a prononcée à Rennes en novembre 1998 sur son roman The Handmaid's Tale (La Servante écarlate) et sur le genre auquel il appartient. Le roman, inscrit aux programmes 1999 du CAPES et de l'agrégation d'anglais, a été l'un des plus grands succès littéraires des années 80 aux États-Unis, au Canada et en Grande-Bre.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Thorndike Press Large Print
Total Pages:
Release: 2017
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781432838478

The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood

The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood
Author: Coral Ann Howells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2006-03-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139827316

Margaret Atwood's international celebrity has given a new visibility to Canadian literature in English. This Companion provides a comprehensive critical account of Atwood's writing across the wide range of genres within which she has worked for the past forty years, while paying attention to her Canadian cultural context and the multiple dimensions of her celebrity. The main concern is with Atwood the writer, but there is also Atwood the media star and public performer, cultural critic, environmentalist and human rights spokeswoman, social and political satirist, and mythmaker. This immensely varied profile is addressed in a series of chapters which cover biographical, textual, and contextual issues. The Introduction contains an analysis of dominant trends in Atwood criticism since the 1970s, while the essays by twelve leading international Atwood critics represent the wide range of different perspectives in current Atwood scholarship.

The Grace Year

The Grace Year
Author: Kim Liggett
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1250145465

The Instant New York Times Bestseller! Kim Liggett's The Grace Year is a speculative thriller in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power. Survive the year. No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden. In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive. Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life—a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear. It’s not even the poachers in the woods, men who are waiting for a chance to grab one of the girls in order to make a fortune on the black market. Their greatest threat may very well be each other. With sharp prose and gritty realism, The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between. “A visceral, darkly haunting fever dream of a novel and an absolute page-turner.” – Libba Bray, New York Times bestselling author

A Small Place

A Small Place
Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2000-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466828838

A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John "If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ." So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2010-07-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307400840

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize. Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter.

Archive Fever

Archive Fever
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1996
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780226143361

As a depository of civic record and social history whose very name derives from the Greek word for town hall, the archive would seem to be a public entity, yet it is stocked with the personal, even intimate, artifacts of private lives. It is this inherent tension between public and private which inaugurates, for Derrida, an inquiry into the human impulse to preserve, through technology as well as tradition, both a historical and a psychic past. What emerges is a marvelous expansive work, engaging at once Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism in a profound reflection on the real, the unreal, and the virtual.

Swastika Night

Swastika Night
Author: Katharine Burdekin
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1985
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780935312560

In a "feudal Europe seven centuries into post-Hitlerian society, Burdekin's novel explores the connection between gender and political power and anticipates modern feminist science fiction."--Cover.