Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale presents its reader with an exercise in learning how to read for survival. The novel argues for a reading that combines emotional and intellectual perception and it demonstrates that without the combination of feeling and thinking, political meaning is lost. Atwood sets her novel in a future America, called Gilead. Pollution and war have resulted in a depletion of the white elite population and after a takeover of the government a stern religious patriarchy institutes a new regime dedicated to increasing the white population. Reproductive control always implies control of women, and Gilead first deprives the female population of all economic power and then divides them into five subjugated classes: Aunts, who do the dirty work of the revolution; Wives, who, past childbearing age, are married to the commanding elite; Econowives, women incapable of producing children, who marry the working classes; Marthas, servants of the Wives; and Handmaids, who have previously proven their ability to produce children and now are to do so for the elite Commanders. The futurist setting allows Atwood to invent words, reassign meanings, and explore the implications of a patriarchal language involved in creating an especially misogynist world. The three sections of the novel-the dedication, the tale itself, and the historical epilogue-combine to produce a text which comments on itself, on the act of authorship, and on the act of reading. Within the story itself, three narrative

Anne Cassebaum, A Comment on "The Wyoming Conference Resolution Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing", College English, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Oct., 1989), pp. 636-638

Robert D. Narveson, George Bellis, Two Comments on "Textual Harassment of Marvell's Coy Mistress: The Institutionalization of Masculine Criticism", College English, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Apr., 1989), pp. 424-429

Literary theories put forward by Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Walter Michaels, and Jonathan Culler all insist, to varying degrees, that any individual critic's view of a particular literary text is likely to be affected by certain assumptions (schemata) shared by the community of scholars to which the critic belongs. Literary interpretation, so the argument goes, is not a matter of individual perception alone; every interpretation is both a process of individual discovery and a product of shared interpretive strategies. From this reader-response perspective, then, the prior assumptions held by the interpretive community are crucial constituents of the discourse, and often, as in the case of the Canadian interpretive response, such shared assumptions form the paradigm that in time becomes the locus of critical authority. Canadian criticism, in particular that branch which focuses on prairie fiction, offers an intriguing case study of just such an interpretive community at work. Canadian literary criticism has long spoken if not with one voice then at least with a widely-shared critical intent: to further the aims of cultural nationalism by establishing a critical narrative that privileges those aspects of Canadian literature-the lonely prairie landscape, the implacable brooding force of Nature, the sense of human isolation-that are historically associated with the early Canadian pioneer experience and the process of nation-building. Once accepted, the narrative assumes paradigmatic status: it establishes a closed frame of reference marked by remarkable critical consensus. Such a state of critical concord has not gone unnoticed. In his retrospective look at the teaching of Canadian literature, John Harker explains that