Forty years telling the tale. Atwood’s work: past, present and future. Granada, June 23rd & 24th
Last year Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its publication in 1985. The novel has become immensely popular around the world, and its success has further increased with the TV adaption by Hulu, offering this year its sixth and final season. Coinciding with the Doctor Honoris Causa Award by the University of Granada on June 22nd, the Margaret Atwood Society and the University of Granada want to commemorate this anniversary with a conference, themed specially on this novel and its adaptation, but also on Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre and how literature becomes a transformative tool for society. Considering that the impact of this novel can exemplify diverse links between literature and society, we would also like to focus on how literature has intervened in the cultural discourses around the globe. Furthermore, in response to politics and readers’ questions about unresolved issues in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments (2019) came out addressing some of them, including new narrative points of view and adding feminist political interventions to the main protagonists. This can be regarded as one of the many examples of how Margaret Atwood’s work engages with societal issues, informing literary criticism and theory by expanding the very limits of what we understand by literature. This conference is to celebrate Margaret Atwood’s work, the end of the TV series and release of the adaptation of The Testaments, as well as the extensive academic work around them. We hope that the contributions to the conference will help explain hierarchical structures in society and, at the same time, transform how we understand literary criticism and literary theory. Due to the geopolitical context of the moment, it also aims at exploring connections around the globe, with a particular focus on literary works as interventions of social justice departing from feminist points of view using Atwood’s work. Additionally, we are looking for creative interventions from posthumanist and new materialist perspectives that add dynamism to matter and affects in order to find methodologies able to dismantle hierarchies of power. Furthermore, we would also like to explore the possibilities that literature might have as a pedagogical means in different disciplines, developing interdisciplinary approaches, which also contribute to the expansion of the very definition of literature that Atwood’s work fosters. One possible way to illustrate this is to exemplify how we use her work in tertiary education in disciplines other than contemporary literature.
Therefore, we invite papers that deal with (but are not limited to) the following:
Canadian studies: genealogies and current theories.
Resilience, secrecy and trauma studies in Margaret Atwood’s work
Postcolonial approaches in Margaret Atwood’s work
New materialist studies, affect theories, and posthuman approaches to Atwood’s work: materializing realities
Literature as a living matter that transforms society
Pedagogical examples of Atwood’s work
Connection between Atwood’s work and Spanish literature
Feminist approaches to Atwood’s work – Adaptation studies: transmediality in Atwook’s work.
All papers will be delivered onsite, and we would be delighted if you could join us. Please, send your abstracts (300 words) and short bio (100 words) to the conference organizers beatrizrevelles@ugr.es and mdiazd@ugr.es. The deadline is May 10th and we will answer before May 30th. This conference is co-hosted by the Margaret Atwood Society: <https://atwoodsociety.org/>.