Word: atwoods
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...verbal panache fool you. Atwood is usually dead serious; serious and getting more so as the years go on as she adds political causes such as Amnesty International to her original crusades against sexism and parochialism. "When you begin to write, you deal with your immediate surroundings," she explains in the introduction; "as you grow, your immediate surroundings become larger. There's no contradiction." Her most weighty essays, "The Curse of Eve" and "An End to Audience?" perceptively and persuasively detail two of her major concerns: the steady worsening of the publishing and distributing industries as ways to disseminate serious...
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...
...author's evident flexibility of diction is another such pleasure. Atwood can range with ease from the academically highbrow to the high-school casual. Even this talent comes under self-satire from time to time, as in "Writing the Male Character...
Such concerns, no matter how jokily narrated, are anything but funny. Atwood demands a response not in terms of philosophy but in the context of the reader's own life; she offers her "far from comprehensive" list of female role models, which covers nearly four pages, and confronts the reader with the choice: which one will you create, or be? Or will you fight, too? As a call to battle, this voice is, perhaps, the best one can imagine...