Volume 10 Table of Contents

    Karma Waltonen

    Karma Waltonen

    Victoria Addis

Abstract: In this essay, I will argue that the groundlessness associated with postmodernism is not as entrenched within its discourse as it may appear. Graham Swift’s Waterland (1992) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) share an ecopostmodernist platform that raises questions about the human relationship with nature, while conforming to many of the aesthetic values of postmodernism. Both works actively interrogate the boundaries between human/animal/machine and nature/civilisation, revealing environmentally aware perspectives informed by a postmodern sensibility. In their encompassing of environmental and ecological perspectives, both novels critique elements of postmodernity and contemporary consumer capitalism, and raise serious questions about our relationship to the world around us. In defiance of traditional notions of postmodernism, Atwood’s and Swift’s novels exemplify an engagement with the natural world and present conceptions of reality that do not accept disengagement or detachment as a suitable response to the perceived ‘postmodernist cataclysms threatening the grounds of human existence’ (Stierstorfer 234).

    Alex Tammaro

Abstract:  [Winner of the Best Graduate Essay Award] The symbolic importance given to water, from the title of the novel [Surfacing] to the circumstances surrounding her father’s death, elevates an amphibious reading by lending it the mass of symbolic significance water carries, particularly its dual role as a symbol of life and death, and through an amphibian reading of Surfacing, readers witness the trouble that accompanies self-identification and viewing the self, loved ones, and the past.

    Ariel McLean

Abstract:  [Winner of the Best Undergraduate Essay] In Margaret Atwood’s “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart,” the speaker is a woman who has some sort of malfunction with her physical heart. She concludes by communicating her suicidal thoughts, foreseeing the day when her heart is no longer in existence. In Atwood’s “The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart,” which is a sequel to “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart,” the speaker delves into the many ways her heart has wronged her. While the sequel poem is supposed to represent the speaker overcoming her lack of acceptance for her heart, this is not really the case. Rather, the speaker remains in denial about her heart being a part of her, as she previously does in “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart.”

    Anne Graue

Abstract:  A review of Hag-seed by Margaret Atwood (2016)

    Ashley Thomson, Shoshannah Ganz

    Karma Waltonen, Eleonora Rao