Word: atwood
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...Atwood apologizes in the introduction that "I don't like writing the kinds of things that are brought together in this volume nearly as much as I like writing other kinds of things." She then goes on to describe approach-avoidance reactions and procrastination worthy of any reading-period squeeze. In all fairness, the essays suggest that her preference for writing fiction and poetry is well-founded. The value of the book reviews included (analyses of Kate Millett's autobiography Flying Marge Pwrey's Woman on the Edge of Time, and the works of Adrienne Rich, E.L. Doctorow and Tillie...
...often-combative lectures on "Being a Woman Writer: Paradoxes and Dilemmas"; on "The Curse of Eve, or What I Learned in School"; on witches; and the lively tour de force which ends the volume, "Writing the Male Character." In these lectures, several of them first delivered at Harvard, Atwood's piercing wit, her incisive dissection of the pitfalls of male-female relations, and her considerable erudition all come together...
...Writing the Male Character," for instance, for the most part concerns the attacks on Atwood's novels for being "anti-male." She establishes the dukes-up posture early...
Because her approach to the issues of feminism, nationalism, and, in more recent years, world-wide human rights is so insistently personal and specific, the essays do not project a world view so much as a personality. For a far more comprehensive feeling for Atwood's philosophy, one needs to examine the series of novels that have made her famous and have cast her--sometimes unwillingly--as a significant voice of the women's movement: Surfacing, The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm. Set free with fiction, Atwood's remarkable ability to tease the significance...
Such an approach could also be called common sense, and it is this common sense which makes Atwood's insights so accessible and simultaneously so rich. Time after time, the reader's jolt of recognition and pleasure comes from one simple fact: Atwood expresses herself so well. As with her novels, one reads her essays with a pen nearby, constantly jotting down some spark of truth: she offers several epigrams. "Canadian-Arherican Relations Surviving the Eighties" (1981) contains the following aside...