Word: atwoods
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...CANADIAN AUTHOR Margaret Atwood about the critical contention most frequently leveled at her five novels--that they "hate men"--and she will acrew her aristocratic features into a grimace, primly fold her blue-veined hands, and lunch sing-song into what is clearly an oft-repeated litany...
...Atwood's air of unflappability is exactly what one would expect from the assured, seamless flow of her prove and poetry. On one level her protagonists--especially Rennie Wilford, the young "life styles" journalist central to Bodily Harm--are smooth and sophisticated, gliding productively through life. It is this apparent power, most likely, that prompts so many feminists to claim her work as the ideological property of the women's movement, a tendency which leads naturally to the temptation to dismiss her male supporting characters as evil insensitive foils for the struggling females. The temptation is false, through: Atwood...
WHAT THE FEMINIST interpretation of Atwood's work ignores, though, is the texture and depth of even the most textbook "liberated" characters. In Life Before Man, the novel before Bodily Harm, for instance. Lesje, one of three narrators who form a triangle, holds a paleontology job at a Toronto museum. She works there passionately, betraying encyclopedic knowledge, weaving elaborate Cretaceous fantasies Atwood's twist makes the job consist in large measure of classifying, cleaning and filing innumerable Jurassic fish earbones...
Throughout, Atwood downplays the island's inflammatory politics, using Rennie's character and the stunning force of her own visual imagery to fuel tension. She disavows that any specific foreign incident inspired the setting, preferring to generalize: "I've been places like that, and you can think about what's happening to journalists in foreign countries these days...
...barterers, though, still do some things the old-fashioned cash-on-the-barrelhead way. Atwood Richards pays its 58 employees primarily in cash, although some workers gladly accept some of their pay in the form of free hotel and travel services while on vacation...