Margaret Atwood e a Ficção Científica

The Handmaid’s Tale recebeu o primeiro Prêmio Arthur C. Clarke Award em 1987. Também foi nomeado ao Nebula Award de 1986 e ao Prometheus Award de 1987, ambos prêmios de ficção científica. No entanto, Atwood nega a ideia de que The Handmaid’s Tale e Oryx and Crake sejam ficção científica. Ao jornal The Guardian, ela afirmou preferir que sua obra seja considerada ficção especulativa a ficção científica. “Em ficção científica tem monstro e naves espaciais; ficção especulativa poderia realmente acontecer.”^[5] Para ela, a diferença entre ficção científica e especulativa é que a primeira é algo que nós ainda não podemos fazer. E que a segunda, é sobre assuntos que já estão na nossa frente, e que acontecem na Terra.

Em entrevistas, Atwood já admitiu que obras como The Handmaid’s Tale e Oryx and Crake podem ser consideradas ‘ficção científica social’.

Margaret Atwood e o Feminismo

Atwood, que se envolveu no diálogo intelectual feminino no Victoria College, na Universidade de Toronto, frequentemente retrata personagens femininas dominadas pelo patriarcado em seus romances.^[6] Ainda assim, ela nega que The Edible Woman, por exemplo, publicado em 1969 e que coincidiu com a segunda onda do movimento feminista, seja feminista e alega tê-lo escrito quatro anos antes do movimento. Atwood acredita que o rótulo feminista só pode ser aplicado a escritores que conscientemente trabalham na moldura do movimento feminista.^[7] Em entrevista, Atwood já disse ficar na ponta dos dois extremos. Ela acredita que mulheres não devem ser vistas como inferiores aos homens, mas também não merecem ser vistas com preconceito por escolher ter filhos e um marido.

Section 27

To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. 

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Walt Whitman

Section 27

To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. 

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Walt Whitman

Song of Myself, 3

Walt Whitman – 1819-1892

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread.
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?







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10 of the Best Walt Whitman Poems Everyone Should Read

June 19, 2017 7:00 pm

The best poems by Walt Whitman selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Walt Whitman (1819-92), with his innovative free verse and celebration of the American landscape, made his poetry a sort of literary declaration of independence, seeking to move away from the literary tradition associated with the Old World and forge a new, distinctly American literature. Below are ten of Whitman’s greatest poems which demonstrate how he did this.

‘Song of Myself’. Where better to begin our pick of Whitman’s best poems than here, with the poem which seems best to embody his call for literary independence and self-expression? When Whitman’s 1855 volume Leaves of Grass was published at Whitman’s own expense – the first edition containing just a dozen untitled poems – ‘Song of Myself’ headed the collection. This statement of selfhood contains the famous line ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’.

‘I Sing the Body Electric’. This is perhaps Whitman’s best-known poem, and also featured in the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It does what its title (added later) announces, with Whitman writing about his own body and its various components – but concluding that these are also part of his soul, since soul and body are one.

‘I Hear America Singing’. Although Whitman was a pioneer of free verse and often wrote long, expansive poems, ‘I Hear America Singing’ is just eleven lines long, though Whitman crams a lot into those eleven lines. What better way to continue our brief introduction to America’s best poets than with a poem by one of American poetry’s pioneers, praising the many different people in his nation and the various songs they sing?

‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’. One of several poems Walt Whitman wrote about Abraham Lincoln, and probably the best, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ was written in the summer of 1865, in the aftermath of the assassination of Lincoln in April of that year. An example of the pastoral elegy, this poem wasn’t considered one of Whitman’s best poems by Whitman himself. However, many of his readers have disagreed, and think this among his finest.

‘O Captain! My Captain!’. Even those who aren’t familiar with Walt Whitman’s poems may recognise this, thanks to its use in the 1989 Robin Williams film Dead Poets Society. Like ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, this poem was written in the wake of Lincoln’s death in 1865, and is slightly different from much of Whitman’s best-known poetry in that it has a more regular rhyme scheme. The poem became among his best-known, to the extent that Whitman almost regretted writing it later.

‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’. This short poem is divided into two stanzas: the first observes the ‘noiseless patient spider’ of the poem’s title, and the second considers the poet’s own soul and the way it is undertaking a similar attempt to build ‘gossamer’ bridges between things, much as the spider builds a web.

‘O Me! O Life!’. One of the shortest poems on this list, this poem was also featured in Dead Poets Society: Robin Williams’s character recites it to his class. It contains many of the features of Walt Whitman’s greatest poetry: the free verse rhythm, the alternation between long and short lines, the rhetorical (or not-so-rhetorical?) questions, the focus on the self.

‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’. A boy watches two mockingbirds nesting on a beach; but one day he notices that the mother bird hasn’t returned to the nest. The cry uttered by the male bird as it calls for its mate awakens something deep within the young boy, in one of Whitman’s most touching poems (although it was branded ‘unmixed and hopeless drivel’ by one reviewer; it’s rumoured that the response published in the same newspaper shortly afterwards, praising Whitman’s poem, was penned by none other than Whitman himself).

‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’. Another tribute to America as a self-made country and to the pioneering spirit of its people, and a nice counterbalance to the more personal and individual poems on this list.

‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’. This poem addressed to his reader might be viewed as a disclaimer for all of Whitman’s poetry – much as ‘Song of Myself’ can be read as his declaration or credo.