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Notes and Commentaries

Volume 01, Number 1 (1976)

Margaret Atwood and Quebec: A Footnote on Surfacing

  • Carole Gerson
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1976-01-01

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's Surfacing departs significantly from her previous writing through its location in Quebec, a place which serves, as it has for other English-Canadian writers, as a mirror for the narrator's ideals and dispossession. Quebec plays a defining role in the narrator's development, in that her confrontation with the foreign language of her home territory initiates her suspicion of verbal language, which is integral to her plunge through layers of pre-verbal, irrational experience.