Where ‘Each Word is Empire’: Margaret Atwood’s Politicised Poetics

• 영문명: Where ‘Each Word is Empire’: Margaret Atwood’s Politicised Poetics
• 발행기관: 한국캐나다학회
• 저자명: Colin Nicholson
• 간행물 정보: 『Asia-Pacific Journal of Canadian Studies (APJCS)』Vol.14-15, 21~58쪽, 전체 38쪽
• 주제분류: 사회과학 > 지역학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2009.12.31

영문 초록

When Atwood began writing, feminism in its modern forms had not yet mobilised. Because her sense of politics is lived as a personally involving relationship that will be existentialised, archaeologised, satirised and reconstructed across a range of texts and intertexts, her poetry develops energy and impact on the page by negotiating a political infrastructure felt on the pulse. Atwood’s writing has from the beginning elaborated notions of politically gendered subjectivity marked in performing selves whose seeming privacy articulates public administrations (and suppressions) of experiential possibility. Personal immediacies confront both the pressure of externally determined postcolonial priorities and the difficulty of negotiating already internalised language practices. Atwood’s poetics of resistance to a wide range of assumptions, discourses and histories with which it is inevitably complicit generates political resonance from personalised context. Reading her with and against the social and constitutional contexts described by political scientist Alan Cairns discloses a Canadian subjectivity fascinated with what the record does not say, and with gaps and fissures in the systems of recognition archived as cultural heritage and practiced as customary norms. Canada’s historic and continuing ethnic/ cultural diversity is encoded in work which predates the formal inception of what Cairns calls ‘the new role of the constitution in Canadian society’. In this light, and by expressing an already compromised subjectivity, Atwood devises representational latitude for a coherent, autonomous feminine self.

키워드

feminism postcolonial constitutional politics history memory subjectivity