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NISCHIK, REINGARD M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works &Impact. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 344 pp. $65.00.
Written for the occasion of Margaret Atwood's sixtieth birthday in November of 1999, Reingard M. Nischik's Margaret Atwood: Works & Impact is a surprisingly disappointing collection of reflections on Atwood and her work. Although Nischik has assembled an impressive international list of contributors, too many of the essays merely restate the most basic elements of Atwood's considerable oeuvre. That so few of the essays in Nischik's collection, which also contains photographs, an interview, personal reflections from Atwood's business associates, and a selection of Atwood's brilliant comics, illuminate Atwood's substantial output is even more unfortunate when one considers that the fifteen essays were written expressly by Atwood scholars for Nischik's collection.
In "`Flagpoles and Entrance Doors': Introduction." Nischik blandly comments that Nathalie Cooke's "Lions, Tigers, and Pussycats: Margaret Atwood (Auto-) Biographically" "resort[s] to feline imagery." Nischik follows this assessment with the following: "(there's an Atwood scholar for you!)" (3). Regardless of how one reacts to this commentary from the editor of the collection, Cooke's essay, the first in the section of Atwood's life and status, successfully and intelligently assesses the media's portrayal of Margaret Atwood. Invigoratingly pondering various feline metaphors, including those of the stuffed cat, the formidable literary lion, the frightening tiger, and the "overly domestic, inappropriately impotent" pussycat (26) to describe various biographical approaches to Atwood, Cooke ultimately finds such figurative language too limited; instead, she opts for and concludes with a caterpillar image, a metaphor which she finds more apposite to describe an author whose texts and political involvements strongly affect the world.
Susanne Becker's "Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media" relates first how Atwood is often witty and ironic with interviewers and then how Atwood's characters often treat the fictional media with wit and irony. Becker's well-chosen examples from a range of Atwood's novels illustrate her point that Atwood parodies her own encounters with the press while complicating Atwood's frequent claims that her texts are not autobiographical.
Caroline Rosenthal's "Canonizing Atwood: Her Impact on Teaching in the US, Canada, and Europe" reveals the results of a survey which Rosenthal conducted, confirming what she "had guessed at before [she] started research...