The Handmaid’s Tale: Writing Dystopia, the Female Gothic and Social Commentary

In this literature course for writers, students learn how to read “through the language” of fiction to visualize the writing process underlying Atwood’s dystopian novel; a first-person narrative powered by the dissonant structure of a postmodern Female Gothic plot. Student writers will learn how to read for the architecture of fiction beyond the classic Aristotelian narrative arc; we examine how to recognize the natural language patterns that shape the primary elements of text. Students will have the opportunity to approach the novel from a self-selected perspective drawn from an array of directions: comparative literature, narrative theory, dystopian literature, the Gothic, film and TV, graphic fiction, feminist/post-feminist critiques, the making and unmaking of human subjectivity, and the socio-political undercurrents powering contemporary American culture, among other approaches. The course aims to sharpen the writer’s craft by illuminating the visual language that ties fiction not simply to meaning and plot, but to the archetypal design patterns that we find within nature itself.