Journée d’études : « L’adaptation et la poétique protéenne de Margaret Atwood » / Symposium :
“Adaptation and the Protean Poetics of Margaret Atwood”
February 1, 2019
Université de Bourgogne
Centre Interlangues : Texte, Image, Langage – EA 4182
MSH, Room R03

Abstracts

Elizabeth MULLEN (Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest), “Ordinary Horror(s): Adapting Feminism, Facts and Fear in The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood 1985, Miller 2017-)”

When Margaret Atwood’s 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’s main argument was that the “extreme feminism” of Atwood’s 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.
Bruce Miller’s 2017 television adaptation of Atwood’s novel received no such censure. From the start, Miller’s Handmaid’s Tale has been lauded for its eerie resemblance to present-day America — to such an extent that protestors dressed in Handmaid costumes have demonstrated in front of the Texas State Capitol, the US Capitol, and Maralago.
This talk will examine the transmedial interplay between fiction and fact, feminism and fear in Atwood’s and Miller’s works on both an aesthetic and a cultural level, focusing particularly on the ways in which The Handmaid’s Tale has adapted (and been adapted) to a Trumpian post-factual media landscape.

Biography
Elizabeth Mullen is an Associate Professor in American Studies, Gender, Television and Film at the Université 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.

David ROCHE (Université de Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès) : “Shallow Focus Composition and the Poetics of Blur in The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017-)”

This talk analyzes one of the most salient devices of the Hulu series’ poetics: the use of shallow focus and more generally blurry images. If the series’ aesthetics takes many of its cues from Atwood’s 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’ 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.

Biography

David Roche is Professor of Film Studies at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 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, CinémAction, Horror Studies, Mise au Point, Post-Script, Transatlantica and TV/Series. He is currently working on metafiction in film and series.

Dr Ingrid BERTRAND (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles / UCLouvain): “From the Silenced Biblical Maid to the 21st-Century Web TV Rebel: The Protean Transformation of the Servant in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its Hulu Adaptation.”

As one of its epigraphs indicates, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s 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’s 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’s growing rejection of her objectification. To illustrate this, I will focus on the plaything imagery used in both the dystopia and the series.
In Atwood’s novel, Offred often compares herself to a doll to convey her sense of being manipulated by Gilead. The Hulu series expands on the novel’s 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’s dystopia: amputation. Defined by Molly Hite as “a tenet at the heart of [many] cultural myths” according to which, for women, “getting one thing always involves giving up another” (138), the motif is found in the 1948 film The Red Shoes – inspired by Andersen’s tale of the same name – 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’s fight to reclaim her humanity.

Sources
– Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Vintage, 1996.
– Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story. Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist
Narratives. Cornell University Press, 1989.

Biography
Ingrid Bertrand, Ph.D. (2011), is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles and UCLouvain (Belgium). She has published several articles on biblical rewritings and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s 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 Michèle Roberts to Jenny Diski (Brill  Rodopi, Spring 2019).

Trip McCrossin (Rutgers University, États-Unis), “The Persistence of Job: The Role of the Problem of Evil in Grounding Atwood’s Protean Poetics.”

“Job,” Offred exclaims, a little more than midway through Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “It’s a funny word,” she continues, in one of her many reminiscences of “the time before,” discussing in particular how for her, for women of Gilead generally, it’s “strange, now, to think about having a job.” It’s 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’re 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: “The Book of Job.”
The Handmaid’s Tale surely reflects, then, the problem for which Job is the conventional touchstone: the problem of evil—the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on,” 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’s work taken more broadly, judging from the periodic reemergence of the Book of Job.
Early in Alias Grace, for example, in part three of fifteen already, Grace Marks recognizes that Dr. Simon Jordan’s description of his peripatetic life, “going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it,” as what Accusing Angel says to God in the Book of Job’s introductory “legend,” which can only cast her in the role of Job, more explicitly now than Atwood had cast Offred in the role in The Handmaid’s Tale. Midway through The Year of the Flood, for another, Adam One, in addressing the “Devotion for the Festival of Arks,” channel’s 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.
The 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’s 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’s response itself protean?

Biography
After 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’s and Kant’s writings, a collection of source materials to accompany Susan Neiman’s 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, and an expanded version of my presentation to the Twentieth Rousseau Association Colloquium, “L’optimisme bien entendu”/“Optimism properly understood.”
trip@mccrossin.org, curriculum vitae available at: http://rci.rutgers.edu/~tripmcc/personal/cv-mccrossin.pdf

Nicole CÔTÉ (Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada): “Atwood’s Protean Poetics: Adaptation in the Service of Survival”

Survival has been, from the beginning, a fundamental theme in Atwood’s 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.
In 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’s titanic task –to show, from a distance, the dire consequences of reification (or of capital) for living beings, the ongoing extinction of the other species –seems to be best served by a frenzied adaptation of the material at hand, be it thematic, genre-related, or word-related.

Biography
Nicole Côté has published a number of articles and chapters about Québec, and Canadian literatures. She co-directed an issue of TTR, « La traduction littéraire et les Amériques », three anthologies, Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard (Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), Expressions culturelles de la francophonie (Québec, 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.

Lena CRUCITTI (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles / UCLouvain), “Transforming the human and the novel: monstrosity in Margaret Atwood’s trilogy Maddaddam”

« 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 réussi » from a Darwinian perspective and suggest that evolving means « assimiler l’autre en soi » (Desblache, Écrire l’Animal Aujourd’hui, 8).
Interestingly, 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.

Biography
Lena Crucitti is a Research Assistant (English literature and linguistics) at Université 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.).

Ruby NIEMANN (University of Adelaide, Australie), “Negotiating with the Dead: Authorial Ghosts and other Spectralities in Atwood’s Adaptations”

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 – The Journals of Susanna Moodie, The Penelopiad, and Hag Seed – 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’s ghosts interact with the indelible mark left by great writers? Furthermore, this paper looks at the gendering of Atwood’s 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’s 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.
Concepts of time, gender, authorship, and adaptation will be explored through a spectral lens as this paper follows the ghostly trails left throughout Atwood’s works.

Biography
Ruby 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.

Anne-Marie PAQUET-DEYRIS (Université Paris Nanterre): “ ‘A lot of it is lies’. The unreliable female (narrator) in Mary Harron’s TV series Alias Grace.”
Part of the reason why Mary Harron’s 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.
In the literal sense then, it is rather a mystery about murders and the hermetic personality of the “celebrated murderess” Susanna Moodie alluded to in Life in the Clearings than a formulaic murder mystery.
Grace’s 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 “[herself] behind [herself] concealed” (E. Dickinson, “One need not be a chamber to be haunted”).
The manipulative autobiographical pact she makes with Doctor Jordan unfolds as some on-going game in which actress Sarah Gadon’s masquerading body and narrative quilt forever reformat the truth – if there is any.

Biography
Anne-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 “TV Series & Addiction” 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, légende, imaginaire : Nouvelles études sur le Western. It was co-edited with J.-L. Bourget and F. Zamour and released in April 2018 by Presses de l’ENS/Editions Rue d’Ulm. She just participated in a special issue of Post Script on “Islands and Film” edited by Ian Conrich (et alii) and coming out in March 2019.

Penny FARFAN (University of Calgary, Canada): “Feminist Adaptations/Adaptations of Feminism: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad”

In Women & Power (2017), Mary Beard identifies Penelope’s dismissal by her son Telemachus in Homer’s The Odyssey as the “first recorded instance of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public.” For Beard, Penelope exemplifies “how 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.” Beard’s Penelope is not Margaret Atwood’s, 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 “the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids.” 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’s play accords with Aristotelian elements of tragic form—reversal, recognition, suffering—it does so via modern revisions of the intersection of gender and tragedy, so that her protagonist’s 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 “an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo,” The Penelopiad thus stages the tragedy of Penelope’s tactics as learned from her water naiad mother and her silent compliance as wife. Moreover, given Beard’s invocation of a silenced Penelope as the foundational example of women’s historic and continuing exclusion from power, The Penelopiad continues to echo, particularly in relation to the recent television adaptation of Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). This series generated high praise in its first season (2017) for its dystopic vision of women’s disempowerment and victimization not only by men but by other women, yet generated significant controversy in its second season (2018)—inspired by but not drawn from Atwood’s novel—which some critics argued veers into “torture porn” in its relentless representation of extreme violence against women and which fetishized women’s 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.

Biography

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’s The Penelopiad.