Journ\u00e9e d\u2019\u00e9tudes : \u00ab L\u2019adaptation et la po\u00e9tique prot\u00e9enne de Margaret Atwood \u00bb \/ Symposium :
\n \u201cAdaptation and the Protean Poetics of Margaret Atwood\u201d
\nFebruary 1, 2019
\nUniversit\u00e9 de Bourgogne
\nCentre Interlangues : Texte, Image, Langage – EA 4182
\nMSH, Room R03<\/p>\n
Abstracts<\/p>\n
Elizabeth MULLEN (Universit\u00e9 de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest), \u201cOrdinary Horror(s): Adapting Feminism, Facts and Fear in The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood 1985, Miller 2017-)\u201d<\/p>\n
When Margaret Atwood\u2019s visceral dystopia first appeared in 1985, Mary McCarthy of the New York Times criticized the book for its implausibility, unfavorably comparing it to the more convincing horrors of Huxley, Orwell and Burgess. McCarthy\u2019s main argument was that the \u201cextreme feminism\u201d of Atwood\u2019s tale posited a world so far removed (in 1986) from the realm of the possible that it could spark no real sense of fear in the reasonable reader.
\nBruce Miller\u2019s 2017 television adaptation of Atwood\u2019s novel received no such censure. From the start, Miller\u2019s Handmaid\u2019s Tale has been lauded for its eerie resemblance to present-day America \u2014 to such an extent that protestors dressed in Handmaid costumes have demonstrated in front of the Texas State Capitol, the US Capitol, and Maralago.
\nThis talk will examine the transmedial interplay between fiction and fact, feminism and fear in Atwood\u2019s and Miller\u2019s works on both an aesthetic and a cultural level, focusing particularly on the ways in which The Handmaid\u2019s Tale has adapted (and been adapted) to a Trumpian post-factual media landscape.<\/p>\n
Biography
\nElizabeth Mullen is an Associate Professor in American Studies, Gender, Television and Film at the Universit\u00e9 de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France. Her work focuses on questions of gender and aesthetics in American film, (particularly masculinity and the grotesque) and she has recently written on The Walking Dead and Westworld.<\/p>\n
David ROCHE (Universit\u00e9 de Toulouse II \u2013 Jean Jaur\u00e8s) : \u201cShallow Focus Composition and the Poetics of Blur in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale (Hulu, 2017-)\u201d<\/p>\n
This talk analyzes one of the most salient devices of the Hulu series\u2019 poetics: the use of shallow focus and more generally blurry images. If the series\u2019 aesthetics takes many of its cues from Atwood\u2019s novels, I would like to assess how dynamic the use of shallow focus is. Is it utilized according to a consistent formula? Does it interact with other devices? Do specific scenes and episodes play on and even disrupt the formula? How does this poetics contribute to the production of sensation and meaning? And does it have political implications? Finally, what does the series\u2019 use of shallow focus teach us about tbe poetics of a series and, more generally, about the status of the blur in an audiovisual medium? I hope to answer these questions following a typological analysis of the functions of shallow focus that will be organized from the most common to the less frequent, and that will be divided into three parts devoted to the (de)construction of cinematographic space, of memory and of self.<\/p>\n
Biography<\/p>\n
David Roche is Professor of Film Studies at the Universit\u00e9 Toulouse Jean Jaur\u00e8s, France, and Vice-President of SERCIA (www.sercia.net). He is the author of Quentin Tarantino (2018) and Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s (2014) and the editor of Steven Spielberg, Hollywood Humanist & Wunderkind (2018) and Comics and Adaptation (2018). His work on American, British and Canadian art and horror cinema has appeared in Adaptation, Cin\u00e9mAction, Horror Studies, Mise au Point, Post-Script, Transatlantica and TV\/Series. He is currently working on metafiction in film and series.<\/p>\n
Dr Ingrid BERTRAND (Universit\u00e9 Saint-Louis \u2013 Bruxelles \/ UCLouvain): \u201cFrom the Silenced Biblical Maid to the 21st-Century Web TV Rebel: The Protean Transformation of the Servant in Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale and its Hulu Adaptation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As one of its epigraphs indicates, Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale revisits the silent biblical character of the maid Bilhah, whom the sterile matriarch Rachel gives to Jacob so that she can bear a child in her stead. Transposing this ancient story of forced surrogate motherhood to the 20th and 21st centuries, respectively in the form of a dystopian novel (1985) and a Hulu series (2017 – ), The Handmaid\u2019s Tale challenges the silencing of this female figure. I will show that, from the Bible to the novel and then the series, the silencing of the protagonist progressively recedes thanks to, among others, the surrogate mother\u2019s growing rejection of her objectification. To illustrate this, I will focus on the plaything imagery used in both the dystopia and the series.
\nIn Atwood\u2019s novel, Offred often compares herself to a doll to convey her sense of being manipulated by Gilead. The Hulu series expands on the novel\u2019s toy imagery by adding a new motif: a musical box. Through its dancing ballerina, the box revealingly links plaything imagery to another recurring motif of female oppression in Atwood\u2019s dystopia: amputation. Defined by Molly Hite as \u201ca tenet at the heart of [many] cultural myths\u201d according to which, for women, \u201cgetting one thing always involves giving up another\u201d (138), the motif is found in the 1948 film The Red Shoes \u2013 inspired by Andersen\u2019s tale of the same name \u2013 depicting a ballerina whose conflicting desires for love and a career lead to her downfall. In the web series, Offred immediately voices her refusal to identify with her toy double, which becomes closely associated with the heroine\u2019s fight to reclaim her humanity.<\/p>\n
Sources
\n– Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid\u2019s Tale. Vintage, 1996.
\n– Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story. Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist
\nNarratives. Cornell University Press, 1989.<\/p>\n
Biography
\nIngrid Bertrand, Ph.D. (2011), is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the Universit\u00e9 Saint-Louis \u2013 Bruxelles and UCLouvain (Belgium). She has published several articles on biblical rewritings and Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale. Her research interests are dystopias and manifestations of silence in novels. She is currently preparing a book entitled Biblical Women in Contemporary Novels in English: From Mich\u00e8le Roberts to Jenny Diski (Brill \uf07c Rodopi, Spring 2019).<\/p>\n
Trip McCrossin (Rutgers University, \u00c9tats-Unis), \u201cThe Persistence of Job: The Role of the Problem of Evil in Grounding Atwood\u2019s Protean Poetics.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJob,\u201d Offred exclaims, a little more than midway through Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale. \u201cIt\u2019s a funny word,\u201d she continues, in one of her many reminiscences of \u201cthe time before,\u201d discussing in particular how for her, for women of Gilead generally, it\u2019s \u201cstrange, now, to think about having a job.\u201d It\u2019s also a pretty famous name, we may wonder, given the various scriptural references that punctuate the novel, and its overall moral and political outlook. We\u2019re put off at first, as she continues her having-a-job refrain, but then suddenly, the reference, set out in its very own paragraph, rises conspicuously from the page: \u201cThe Book of Job.\u201d
\nThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale surely reflects, then, the problem for which Job is the conventional touchstone: the problem of evil\u2014the perniciously difficult to satisfy \u201cneed to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason\u2019s ability to go on,\u201d as Susan Neiman has described it, as when (at times incomprehensibly) bad things happen to (at least relatively) good people, and (at least relatively) good things to (at times incomprehensibly) bad people. The problem would appear to be just as formative in Atwood\u2019s work taken more broadly, judging from the periodic reemergence of the Book of Job.
\nEarly in Alias Grace, for example, in part three of fifteen already, Grace Marks recognizes that Dr. Simon Jordan\u2019s description of his peripatetic life, \u201cgoing to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it,\u201d as what Accusing Angel says to God in the Book of Job\u2019s introductory \u201clegend,\u201d which can only cast her in the role of Job, more explicitly now than Atwood had cast Offred in the role in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale. Midway through The Year of the Flood, for another, Adam One, in addressing the \u201cDevotion for the Festival of Arks,\u201d channel\u2019s Job more specifically still, in offering a passage from his response to Zophar, which concludes the first of the three rounds that make up the bulk of the Book of Job, in the way to his confrontation with the Voice from the Whirlwind.
\nThe proposed contribution to the symposium would begin by laying out in more detail the idea that the problem of evil offers a persistent ground to Atwood\u2019s protean poetics. It would address then a resulting question, which is, against the background of the variety of responses to the problem that Neiman helps us to imagine, is Atwood\u2019s response itself protean?<\/p>\n
Biography
\nAfter attending college at the University of Michigan, and graduate school at Stanford and Yale Universities, I joined the Philosophy Department at Rutgers University in 2003, where I am now an Assistant Teaching Professor. I work in various ways on the history and philosophy of the Enlightenment, and its legacy in contemporary ethics, politics, and popular culture. My writing includes, in the latter respect, periodic contributions to the Open Court and Blackwell Popular Culture and Philosophy series, including a co-edited volume in the former, Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy, to appear in 2019. Along more academic lines, I am preparing collections of first English translations of Rousseau\u2019s and Kant\u2019s writings, a collection of source materials to accompany Susan Neiman\u2019s 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, and an expanded version of my presentation to the Twentieth Rousseau Association Colloquium, \u201cL\u2019optimisme bien entendu\u201d\/\u201cOptimism properly understood.\u201d
\ntrip@mccrossin.org, curriculum vitae available at: http:\/\/rci.rutgers.edu\/~tripmcc\/personal\/cv-mccrossin.pdf<\/p>\n
Nicole C\u00d4T\u00c9 (Universit\u00e9 de Sherbrooke, Qu\u00e9bec, Canada): \u201cAtwood\u2019s Protean Poetics: Adaptation in the Service of Survival\u201d <\/p>\n
Survival has been, from the beginning, a fundamental theme in Atwood\u2019s work. In her famous essay Survival (1972), Atwood shows Canadian literature then preoccupied with nature as Monster, infringing upon humans freedom, and as a result creating a garrison mentality.
\nIn her Madaddam Trilogy, though, four decades later, Atwood reverses the equation, showing how human beings can mess with the environment and become the monsters. I would like to relate this revisioning, typical of Atwood, with survival as a theme. Perhaps the Madaddam trilogy, being a dystopia, best exemplifies the organic relationship of survival and adaptation: it obviously thematizes survival by showing humans adapting to the loss of the world as they knew it and the conditions of duress they now face. It shows adaptation as re-creation through its reconfiguration of genres: sci-fi, dystopia, eco-fable, postapocalyptic narrative, and includes sermons, religious hymns as well as ads. Mingling the poetic with the mimetic, it also jingles words, new and old, playing with assonances and alliterations in order to allude to a recreated reality. Another type of adaptation consists in spinning the angle from one book to the other, shifting the point of view, and relativizing the reliability of the until-then-narrator. In other words, Atwood\u2019s titanic task \u2013to show, from a distance, the dire consequences of reification (or of capital) for living beings, the ongoing extinction of the other species \u2013seems to be best served by a frenzied adaptation of the material at hand, be it thematic, genre-related, or word-related.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Biography
\nNicole C\u00f4t\u00e9 has published a number of articles and chapters about Qu\u00e9bec, and Canadian literatures. She co-directed an issue of TTR, \u00ab La traduction litt\u00e9raire et les Am\u00e9riques \u00bb, three anthologies, Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard (Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), Expressions culturelles de la francophonie (Qu\u00e9bec, Nota Bene, 2008) et Varieties of Exile. New Essays on Mavis Gallant (New York, Peter Lang, 2002). She put together two anthologies of Canadian short stories, which she also translated (Nouvelles du Canada Anglais, Vers le rivage) ; She also translated a number of Canadian authors, the last being Dionne Brand.<\/p>\n
Lena CRUCITTI (Universit\u00e9 Saint-Louis \u2013 Bruxelles \/ UCLouvain), \u201cTransforming the human and the novel: monstrosity in Margaret Atwood’s trilogy Maddaddam\u201d<\/p>\n
“Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 194). In the Maddaddam trilogy, Margaret Atwood imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which the last human beings have to coexist with Crakers, technologically-enhanced beings created by a hubristic scientist who endowed them with animal characteristics enabling them to survive the Plague that decimated humankind. As I will argue, this fascinating vision of the posthuman being as a blending of the best characteristics that Nature and technology can offer opens the way for a broadening of the definition of what it means to be human. Based on Dominique Lestel’s theory of monstrosity as being an inherent part of humanity, I will show that these novels put forward a vision of the human as “un monster qui a r\u00e9ussi” from a Darwinian perspective and suggest that evolving means “assimiler l’autre en soi” (Desblache, \u00c9crire l’Animal Aujourd’hui, 8).
\nInterestingly, the form of the three novels evokes the same complexity that characterizes the Crakers. At different formal levels, the trilogy is far from corresponding to an organic whole: it includes fragments coming from many different genres (songs, homelies, hymns, etc.) and a considerable diversity of narrative voices. Virginia Woolf describes the novel as “this most pliable of all forms” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 77). I will show that Atwood renews the genre of the novel by taking this “pliability” to the extreme. In the Maddaddam trilogy, the novel has to become “monstrous” to adequately address the new condition of humankind.<\/p>\n
Biography
\nLena Crucitti is a Research Assistant (English literature and linguistics) at Universit\u00e9 Saint-Louis – Bruxelles. She has just started a PhD under the supervision of Dr. Ingrid Bertrand on the functions of the pervasive presence of animals in 21st-century dystopian literature (novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Naomi Alderman, etc.).<\/p>\n
Ruby NIEMANN (University of Adelaide, Australie), \u201cNegotiating with the Dead: Authorial Ghosts and other Spectralities in Atwood\u2019s Adaptations\u201d<\/p>\n
From Susannah Moodie to Shakespeare, Atwood has revisited and revised the lives and works of iconic authors in her own style since the beginning of her career. This paper looks at the connections between three of these adaptations \u2013 The Journals of Susanna Moodie, The Penelopiad, and Hag Seed \u2013 and in particular the ghostly figures and fingerprints these three works carry. Drawing on the field of hauntology, particularly the work of Esther Peeren and Maria del Pilar Blanco, this paper explores the role of ghosts in retellings of classic and iconic texts in regards to the haunting presence of the author. How do Atwood\u2019s ghosts interact with the indelible mark left by great writers? Furthermore, this paper looks at the gendering of Atwood\u2019s ghosts. What power is there in speaking from beyond the grave, especially for women who may not have had the right to a voice in life? The unique subjectivity and agency of the spectral figures woven throughout Atwood\u2019s adaptations offers a tantalising glimpse at how these retellings can be viewed as both adaptations and re-appropriations of powerful meta-narratives surrounding authorship and the ownership of culture.
\nConcepts of time, gender, authorship, and adaptation will be explored through a spectral lens as this paper follows the ghostly trails left throughout Atwood\u2019s works. <\/p>\n
Biography
\nRuby Niemann is a second year PhD candidate from the University of Adelaide researching the works of Margaret Atwood and the Anthropocene. Her research interests include Anthropocene theory, genre theory, queer theory, and female novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries.<\/p>\n
Anne-Marie PAQUET-DEYRIS (Universit\u00e9 Paris Nanterre): \u201c \u2018A lot of it is lies\u2019. The unreliable female (narrator) in Mary Harron\u2019s TV series Alias Grace.\u201d
\nPart of the reason why Mary Harron\u2019s miniseries Alias Grace holds such a fascination for the viewer has to do the way in which the narrative unfolds, never fully reaching either a definitive truth or any form of closure.
\nIn the literal sense then, it is rather a mystery about murders and the hermetic personality of the \u201ccelebrated murderess\u201d Susanna Moodie alluded to in Life in the Clearings than a formulaic murder mystery.
\nGrace\u2019s baffling & enigmatic figure takes center stage in this intricate web of open-ended narratives, but her figure also observes from a distance the complex structure of these multi-layered tales and their sometimes contradictory strands. As the original core of all the narratives, Grace is therefore framed as the mistress-weaver who toys with concealed, superimposed discourses only partly revealing \u201c[herself] behind [herself] concealed\u201d (E. Dickinson, \u201cOne need not be a chamber to be haunted\u201d).
\nThe manipulative autobiographical pact she makes with Doctor Jordan unfolds as some on-going game in which actress Sarah Gadon\u2019s masquerading body and narrative quilt forever reformat the truth \u2013 if there is any.<\/p>\n
Biography
\nAnne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, apaquet-deyris@parisnanterre.fr, is Professor of Film and TV Series Studies and (African) American Literature at University Paris Nanterre. She has cohosted an international symposium on Hammer Films at Paris Nanterre and Sorbonne Nouvelle in June 2015 and an international conference on Simon’s Treme, New Orleans and Music, in June 2016: https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/musique-pour-limaginaire\/treme-new-orleans-quand-la-ville-sinvente-en-musique. She also worked on \u201cTV Series & Addiction\u201d with psychologists from University Paris Nanterre and a specialist of TV series from Paris 8 University. The resulting book entitled Combining Aesthetic and Psychological Approaches to TV Series Addiction was co-edited with N. Camart, S. Lefait and L. Romo (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018). Her latest volume is about the history of the American West in the Western film genre, Histoire, l\u00e9gende, imaginaire : Nouvelles \u00e9tudes sur le Western. It was co-edited with J.-L. Bourget and F. Zamour and released in April 2018 by Presses de l\u2019ENS\/Editions Rue d\u2019Ulm. She just participated in a special issue of Post Script on \u201cIslands and Film\u201d edited by Ian Conrich (et alii) and coming out in March 2019.<\/p>\n
Penny FARFAN (University of Calgary, Canada): \u201cFeminist Adaptations\/Adaptations of Feminism: Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Penelopiad\u201d<\/p>\n
In Women & Power (2017), Mary Beard identifies Penelope\u2019s dismissal by her son Telemachus in Homer\u2019s The Odyssey as the \u201cfirst recorded instance of a man telling a woman to \u2018shut up\u2019; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public.\u201d For Beard, Penelope exemplifies \u201chow deeply embedded in Western culture are the mechanisms that silence women, that refuse to take them seriously, and that sever them . . . from the centres of power.\u201d Beard\u2019s Penelope is not Margaret Atwood\u2019s, however. In her 2005 novel The Penelopiad, Atwood revisits The Odyssey by way of the female figures at the margins of the heroic male-centered epic, giving \u201cthe telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids.\u201d In giving voice to the maids, Atwood drew inspiration from the use of the chorus in ancient Greek drama, but in her subsequent adaptation of the novel for the stage, The Penelopiad took shape as a tragedy, with Penelope narrating her story from the underworld where she is eternally haunted by the maids and her role in their rapes and murders. While Atwood\u2019s play accords with Aristotelian elements of tragic form\u2014reversal, recognition, suffering\u2014it does so via modern revisions of the intersection of gender and tragedy, so that her protagonist\u2019s reversal of fortune is not the result of her incursion into the male-dominated public sphere, but, rather, of her failure to speak. Described by Atwood as \u201can echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo,\u201d The Penelopiad thus stages the tragedy of Penelope\u2019s tactics as learned from her water naiad mother and her silent compliance as wife. Moreover, given Beard\u2019s invocation of a silenced Penelope as the foundational example of women\u2019s historic and continuing exclusion from power, The Penelopiad continues to echo, particularly in relation to the recent television adaptation of Atwood\u2019s novel The Handmaid\u2019s Tale (1985). This series generated high praise in its first season (2017) for its dystopic vision of women\u2019s disempowerment and victimization not only by men but by other women, yet generated significant controversy in its second season (2018)\u2014inspired by but not drawn from Atwood\u2019s novel\u2014which some critics argued veers into \u201ctorture porn\u201d in its relentless representation of extreme violence against women and which fetishized women\u2019s bodies and reproductive functions while at the same time intending to resist such fetishization in the era of Donald Trump and the Me Too Movement. Similarly featuring a wife and her maids, The Penelopiad suggests the critical power of feminist playwriting for the stage as distinct from this extended television series that claims to be feminist while also functioning as popular entertainment for a mass audience.<\/p>\n
Biography<\/p>\n
Penny Farfan is Professor of Drama at the University of Calgary and the author of Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Performing Queer Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2017), as well as many articles and book chapters on modernism and performance and on contemporary women playwrights. She is also the editor with Lesley Ferris of Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and a past editor of Theatre Journal. Her work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and grants, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and with the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Outstanding Article Award, Excellence in Editing Award (for sustained career achievement), and Women and Theatre Program Achievement Award for Scholarship. She is currently working on a new co-edited book of essays on contemporary women playwrights, to which she will be contributing a chapter on Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Penelopiad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Journ\u00e9e d\u2019\u00e9tudes : \u00ab L\u2019adaptation et la po\u00e9tique prot\u00e9enne de Margaret Atwood \u00bb \/ Symposium : \u201cAdaptation and the Protean Poetics of Margaret Atwood\u201d February 1, 2019 Universit\u00e9 de Bourgogne Centre Interlangues : Texte, Image, Langage – EA 4182 MSH, Room R03 Abstracts Elizabeth MULLEN (Universit\u00e9 de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest), \u201cOrdinary Horror(s): Adapting Feminism, Facts…<\/p>\n