Eye to I, Tail to Tale: Atwood, Offred and the Politicized Classroom

Authors

  • Christine St. Peter University of Victoria

Abstract

This essay suggests the effectiveness of using Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as an experiential base from which to theorize about the definition of political action; about reading as a feminist, especially of an arguably feminist text; about the construction of "subject," both in fiction and in the politicized classroom of Women's Studies; about the mechanisms of control by means of extreme visibility (Foucault); about the philosophical theory of "conflictual conversation" (Young-Bruehl), both as personal resource and as political strategy. The short essay that follows (p. 104) demonstrates how the concept of "conflictual conversation" works to explain the experience of a Native girl in a Canadian residential school in the 1960s.

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Published

1992-04-01

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (1992)

Section

Original Research

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