Word: atwoods
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...READ Margaret Atwood's own voice--as opposed to one of the many voices of her fictional and poetic personae--is to see the feminist motto "the personal is political" in a new light. Atwood once described herself in an interview as a "de facto feminist," taking the position that every intelligent woman is a feminist--but she can also argue from the standpoint of a crusader for women's rights, a poet, a novelist, a pioneering critic of Canadian literature, a Canadian nationalist, and an Amnesty International activist. The essays in Second Words emanate from all these Atwoods...
Second Words, Atwood's selected essays from 1960 to the present, span the growth of her consciousness of injustice and her defense against growing attacks. Some of the battles she fought, as recounted in the book's second section--which she dubs "Dugout"--may seem remote to the non-Canadian reader in the present, as may some of the poetry reviewed in Atwood's early years, under the title "Rooming House." The shorthand, completely personal references ("Rooming House," she says, "runs from 1960 to 1971, during which I moved about fifteen times, always to places with a lot of stairs...
...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...