Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works ed. by Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, Shannon Hengen

Abstract

In light of Kroller’s comment (in relation to Rocky Mountain Foot) that “in the city ... he is living in a collage. ... Where unlike things are stuck together they create a new reality. With the reader’s help” (41; emphasis added), her earlier claim that collage has the ability to deconstruct hege­ monies seems facile, a fact of which Bowering seems aware. He knows he needs communities of readers, writers, artists, to move toward a “creatively open horizon,” and even then ... In her desire to prove Bowering’s moral and social relevance, Kroller misses the richest opportunities available to explore such an argument: in the bright circles of colour the poems themselves turn. NOTE 1 “The Organizing Principle of Art in the Age of the Relativity of Art.” Ed. Katherine Hoffman, Collage: Critical Views. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989. 39-57. s u s a n Ru d y / University of Calgary Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen, eds., Ap­ proaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works (New York: MLA of America, 1996). vii, 215. $37.50 (U.S.) cloth, $18.00 (U.S.) paper. This collection is part of the series Approaches to Teaching World Litera­ ture, edited by Joseph Gibaldi, which now includes an impressive range of works, from Murisaki Shibuku’s Tale of Genji to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The collection begins with a 12-page overview of Atwood’s other works, the Canadian and feminist contexts for her work, and the important literary critical approaches to it. The bulk of the book, labelled “Approaches,” with its own introduction by Sharon R. Wilson, is divided further into sections, “Backgrounds,” “Classrooms,” “A Case Study: The Handmaid’s Tale,” and “Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities.” I suspect the headings are imposed by the series format, since they seem rather arbitrary. In fact, this might better be viewed as a collection of short pa­ pers on Atwood’s work, with a pronounced bias towards pedagogy. Jerome Rosenburg contributes a biographical piece, Donna Bennett and Nathalie Cooke contextualize Atwood within both Canadian feminism and the Cana­ dian canon, Lorraine M. York talks about Atwood as a satirist (noting that this often produces irritable readings, since women are not supposed to be satirists), Diana Brydon puts her work into a postcolonial context, and Wil­ son discusses her intertextual and sexual politics. The “Classrooms” section 219 contains essays on teaching Survival in a Canadian Studies course, on the Atwood poems in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, on the use of Atwood in Creative Writing classes, and on comedy, popular culture, and Atwood as a skilled practitioner of the prose poem. It is not clear why this section is different from the “Pedagogical Challenges” section, which contains articles on The Journals of Susanna Moodie as life writing, You Are Happy, Surfacing, Cat’s Eye, Wilderness Tips, and a general article on using Atwood to teach critical theory and praxis. I have not read any other books in this series, but I feel that the title of this one is misleading, since some of the best articles in it have nothing to do with The Handmaid’s Tale. Some of the articles on teaching appear to suffer from the assumption that a narrative of what their authors do in the classroom can stand on its own, without any further research. Indeed, one article conveys the doubtless mistaken impression that its author has read nothing of Atwood but the poems in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women — I suspect this impression may result from series requirements about length and documentation. Unfortunately, requirements like this reinforce the idea that somehow research does not feed into teaching, and moreover severely handicap a contributor like Patricia Merivale, whose account of Atwood’s expertise in the prose poem tradition is what a prose poem is to a novel, brilliantly but (in this case) regrettably compressed. I have lately started to develop a real bias against textbooks, anthologies, or handbooks like this one that impose frameworks on contributor and reader alike, and that produce the impression of a homogeneous work out of a large array of idiosyncratic approaches. But...