Windy City Media Group Frontpage News

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

home search facebook twitter join
Gay News Sponsor Windy City Times 2023-12-13
DOWNLOAD ISSUE
Donate

Sponsor
Sponsor
Sponsor

  WINDY CITY TIMES

Margaret Atwood to discuss 'The Handmaid's Tale' at Northwestern Oct. 30
2018-10-21

This article shared 1251 times since Sun Oct 21, 2018
facebook twitter google +1 reddit email


EVANSTON, Ill. — Margaret Atwood, author of "The Handmaid's Tale," will visit Northwestern University to discuss the implications her 1985 dystopian novel has on our contemporary world as part of the One Book One Northwestern program.

"It's astonishing to me how 'The Handmaid's Tale' — a book first published in 1985, over 30 years ago — has found itself more timely now than it was when it appeared," Atwood said. "This is due in part to the excellence of the MGM/Hulu television series, but also to the times we live in — times I could not possibly have predicted when I was writing the book."

Atwood will take part in conversations with Northwestern faculty members Oct. 30 on both the Evanston and Chicago campuses. The Chicago campus event will take place at noon in Northwestern Pritzker School of Law's Thorne Auditorium, 357 E. Chicago Ave., and the Evanston campus event will be held at 4:30 p.m., in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 50 Arts Circle Drive.

The author will be joined in conversation with law professors Deborah Tuerkheimer, who specializes in law and legal theory surrounding sexual assault, and Angela Lawson, associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology and psychiatry at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine for the Chicago event. In Evanston, Atwood will be joined by English professor and One Book Faculty Chair Helen Thompson.

Set in a dystopian future in which the U.S. government has been overthrown by a theocratic authoritarian regime that uses fertile women as handmaids to bear children for the all-controlling ruling class, "The Handmaid's Tale" is a modern classic that explores the politics of religion and gender and offers a warning about a future the author hopes will never come to pass.

The main character and narrator, the Handmaid Offred — one of many women forced to reproduce with the regime's ruling men in the wake of environmental collapse that has led to widespread infertility — is the property of a commander in the Republic of Gilead.

Offred holds out hope that she will one day be reunited with her husband and daughter while, in defiance of her captors and the law, secretly recording her story.

"Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' offers the Northwestern community an opportunity to engage today's conversation about women's status in America and across the globe," Thompson said. "Atwood's vision of a near future, patriarchal dystopia invites us to think hard about what feminism is and how it matters to us in our everyday lives — not just because we are gendered selves, but because we are historical actors, agents of acceptance, change and resistance."

Atwood has long been a literary titan, but "current events have polished the oracular sheen of her reputation," says The New Yorker.

"The Handmaid's Tale" has been translated into more than 40 languages; it has been made in to a film, an opera, a ballet and, of course, is the inspiration for an MGM/Hulu original series that aired in April 2017 to rave reviews — winning Emmys, Golden Globes and Critics' Choice Awards for its first season.

Atwood started writing the novel in West Berlin in 1984, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time when the threat of a militaristic authoritarian superpower was all too real during the Cold War.

At the time, she was unsure if she would be able to persuade American readers that the U.S. had been transformed from a liberal democracy into a theocratic dictatorship. Today, in the wake of the Women's March and the #MeToo movement, heightened anxieties and the proliferation of extremist views, the patriarchal society Atwood creates in the novel feels, to some, like a warning.

"It has taken over 200 years and much labor for the right of women to be treated as full human beings to be recognized; some of the gains are very recent indeed," Atwood said.

"And now it seems there is a concerted effort to push women back in time, not only in the United States but in many countries. This is why audiences have reacted so strongly to the show, and why it has become an internationally understood symbol," Atwood said.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is not a prediction, Atwood states in a new introduction to the book.

"Let's say it's an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won't happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either," Atwood writes.

Atwood, whose work has been published in 35 countries, is the author of more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. In addition to "The Handmaid's Tale," Atwood's novels include "Alias Grace," which won the Giller Prize in Canada; "The Blind Assassin," winner of the Booker Prize in 2000; "Cat's Eye," also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and "Oryx and Crake," shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize.

The One Book One Northwestern Program is sponsored by the Office of the President and will include related films, lectures and other programming throughout the coming academic year. The campus-wide read is chosen by the University's One Book selection committee.


This article shared 1251 times since Sun Oct 21, 2018
facebook twitter google +1 reddit email

Out and Aging
Presented By

  ARTICLES YOU MIGHT LIKE

Gay News

Kara Swisher talks truth, power in tech at Chicago Humanities event 2024-03-25
- Lesbian author, award-winning journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher spoke about truth and power in the tech industry through the lens of her most recent book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, March 21 at First ...


Gay News

RuPaul finds 'Hidden Meanings' in new memoir 2024-03-18
- RuPaul Andre Charles made a rare Chicago appearance for a book tour on March 12 at The Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave. Presented by National Public Radio station WBEZ 91.5 FM, the talk coincided with ...


Gay News

Without compromise: Holly Baggett explores lives of iconoclasts Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap 2024-03-04
- Jane Heap (1883-1964) and Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), each of them a native Midwesterner, woman of letters and iconoclast, had a profound influence on literary culture in both America and Europe in the early 20th Century. Heap ...


Gay News

There she goes again: Author Alison Cochrun discusses writing journey 2024-02-27
- By Carrie Maxwell When Alison Cochrun began writing her first queer romance novel in 2019, she had no idea it would change the course of her entire life. Cochrun, who spent 11 years as a high ...


Gay News

NATIONAL Women's college, banned books, military initiative, Oregon 2023-12-29
- After backlash regarding a decision to update its anti-discrimination policy and open enrollment to some transgender applicants, a Catholic women's college in Indiana will return to its previous admission policy, per The National Catholic Reporter. In ...


Gay News

NATIONAL School items, Miami attack, Elliot Page, Fire Island 2023-12-22
- In Virginia, new and returning members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and Fairfax County School Board were inaugurated—with some school board members opting to use banned books on the topics of slavery and LGBTQ+ ...


Gay News

Chicago author's new guide leads lesbian fiction authors toward inspiration and publication 2023-12-07
- From a press release: Award-winning and bestselling lesbian fiction author Elizabeth Andre—the pen name for a Chicago-based interracial lesbian couple—has published her latest book, titled Self-Publishing Lesbian Fiction, Write Your ...


Gay News

NATIONAL Tenn. law, banned books, rainbow complex, journalists quit 2023-12-01
- Under pressure from a lawsuit over an anti-LGBTQ+ city ordinance, officials in Murfreesboro, Tennessee removed language that banned homosexuality in public, MSNBC noted. Passed in June, Murfreesboro's "public decency" ordinance ...


Gay News

BOOKS Lucas Hilderbrand reflects on gay history in 'The Bars Are Ours' 2023-11-29
- In The Bars Are Ours (via Duke University Press), Lucas Hilderbrand, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California-Irvine, takes readers on a historical journey of gay bars, showing how the venues ...


Gay News

BOOKS Owen Keehnen takes readers to an 'oasis of pleasure' in 'Man's Country' 2023-11-27
- In the book Man's Country: More Than a Bathhouse, Chicago historian Owen Keehnen takes a literary microscope to the venue that the late local icon Chuck Renslow opened in 1973. Over decades, until it was demolished ...


Gay News

Photographer Irene Young launches book with stellar concerts 2023-11-20
- "Something About the Women" was appropriately the closing song for two sold-out, stellar concerts at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage November 19, in celebration of the new book of the same name by Irene Young, the legendary ...


Gay News

Rustin film puts a gay pioneer into the spotlight 2023-11-16
- The story of activist Bayard Rustin is one that should be told in classrooms everywhere. Instead, because Rustin was an openly same-gender-loving man, his legacy has gone relatively unnoticed outside of LGBTQ+-focused history books. Netflix hopes ...


Gay News

Billy Masters: The times Streisand failed to make a splash 2023-11-13
- "Fame is a hollow trophy. No matter who you are, you can only eat one pastrami sandwich at a time."—Wise words from Barbra Streisand. You all know that Barbra Streisand's book is out. And I ...


Gay News

Charles Busch dishes on life as a storyteller 2023-11-09
- Performer/writer Charles Busch, who recently penned his autobiography, Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy, said that collecting his most precious and salient memories in a book felt "inevitable." "Storytelling is such an essential ...


Gay News

LGBT HISTORY PROJECT: Exploring 70 years of lesbian publications, from 1940s zines to modern glossy magazines 2023-11-02
- Since the '40s, lesbians have created a vibrant history of publications. From the exploration of daily lesbian life to literary and feminist pursuits, to the modern age of glossy magazines, for over 70 years, lesbians have ...


 


Copyright © 2024 Windy City Media Group. All rights reserved.
Reprint by permission only. PDFs for back issues are downloadable from
our online archives.

Return postage must accompany all manuscripts, drawings, and
photographs submitted if they are to be returned, and no
responsibility may be assumed for unsolicited materials.

All rights to letters, art and photos sent to Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago
Gay and Lesbian News and Feature Publication) will be treated
as unconditionally assigned for publication purposes and as such,
subject to editing and comment. The opinions expressed by the
columnists, cartoonists, letter writers, and commentators are
their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature Publication).

The appearance of a name, image or photo of a person or group in
Nightspots (Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times
(a Chicago Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature
Publication) does not indicate the sexual orientation of such
individuals or groups. While we encourage readers to support the
advertisers who make this newspaper possible, Nightspots (Chicago
GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay, Lesbian
News and Feature Publication) cannot accept responsibility for
any advertising claims or promotions.

 
 

TRENDINGBREAKINGPHOTOS







Sponsor


 



Donate


About WCMG      Contact Us      Online Front  Page      Windy City  Times      Nightspots
Identity      BLACKlines      En La Vida      Archives      Advanced Search     
Windy City Queercast      Queercast Archives     
Press  Releases      Join WCMG  Email List      Email Blast      Blogs     
Upcoming Events      Todays Events      Ongoing Events      Bar Guide      Community Groups      In Memoriam     
Privacy Policy     

Windy City Media Group publishes Windy City Times,
The Bi-Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community.
5315 N. Clark St. #192, Chicago, IL 60640-2113 • PH (773) 871-7610 • FAX (773) 871-7609.