Description:

English Department faculty discuss their unique perspectives on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Eula Biss (English, Artist in Residence) will take up Atwood’s invitation to consider the role of economics in systems of social control. Touching on Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, she will discuss the intersectional politics of economic oppression under capitalism. Sarah Dimick (English, Environmental Humanities) will examine toxic bodies in The Handmaid's Tale, reflecting on contemporary environmentalism’s fraught relationships with population control and reproductive futurity. Julia Stern (English, American Studies) will discuss tropes of sentimentalism and domestic violence in American slave narratives, especially Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as they are deployed and repressed in Atwood’s novel.