"It Is Her Body, Silent/ and Fingerless, Writing this Poem": Margaret Atwood's Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written

Authors

  • Jennifer M. Hoofard Jennifer M. Hoofard, Mills College, California, serves as secretary/historian of the Margaret Atwood Society. She recently filed her dissertation, "Flesh Wounds: Reading the Scar as Text in the Works of Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison," at the University of California, Davis.

Abstract

This article considers Margaret Atwood's Notes Towards A Poem That Can Never Be Written, poems concerned with torture as a human rights violation. It weighs Atwood's appropriation of the suffering of a colonized subject position, with the ethical imperative not to be silent, and hence complicit with existing regimes of power.
The Empty Shopping Cart; Butterfly Russell*, 2006.

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Published

2012-02-23

Issue

Vol. 30 No. 3 (2006): Open Topic Issue/Violence Against Women (Online only)

Section

Original Research

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