Self/image: reading the visual in Atwood's fictive autobiographies

Margaret Atwood's extensive back catalogue includes a group of fictive autobiographies, each engaged in a self-reflexive consideration of the problems involved in writing a life story. These fictive meta-autobiographies consciously critique any act of self-representation within narrative in a radical challenge to phallogocentric models of life-writing and truth-telling. This group of texts (including Cat's Eye [1988], Lady Oracle [1976], The Handmaid's Tale [1985], and The Blind Assassin [2000], as well as some of Atwood's poetry) also incorporates a dominant use of visual images, particularly photographs: each extending questions involving the "real," the "copy," origination, attribution, and authority. These questions open up new ways of considering how text and image conspire to defer certainty in the objective and subjective "real," as Atwood's visual texts prove to be as duplicitous as the language through which they are narrated. This article connects with critical accounts of life-writing and with Susan Sontag's reflections on photography in order to discuss the status of the visual image as an agent of representation within any autobiographical account

Catabolic processes in the nodules of legumes affecting the nitrogen content of the plant

An attempt is made in this paper to prove the theory that the B.radicicola takes up free nitrogen from the atmosphere and builds it to protein for its body tissues, and afterwards this protein is broken down into amino compounds and thence to ammonia, which in turn is nitrified to the nitrate before it may be used by the host plant in its process of tissue building. The soy bean strain of the B. radicicola and the soybean as the host plant were used throughout this study

'It's Just More Acceptable to Be White or Mixed Race and Gay Than Black and Gay': The Perceptions and Experiences of Homophobia in St. Lucia

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals come from diverse cultural groups with differing ethnic and racial identities. However, most research on LGB people uses white western samples and studies of Afro-Caribbean diaspora often use Jamaican samples. Thus, the complexity of Afro-Caribbean LGB peoples’ experiences of homophobia is largely unknown. The authors’ analyses explore experiences of homophobia among LGB people in St. Lucia. Findings indicate issues of skin-shade orientated tolerance, regionalized disparities in levels of tolerance towards LGB people and regionalized passing (regionalized sexual identity shifting). Finally, the authors’ findings indicate that skin shade identities and regional location influence the psychological health outcomes of homophobia experienced by LGB people in St. Lucia

“We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood reflects in her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood, as she does in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, not only on feminist but also on humanist and posthumanist concerns, as she questions the very survival of humankind in an era of environmental destruction, excessive consumption, unregulated biotechnological experiments and pandemic viruses. Offering a strident critique of the contemporary culture of unbridled consumption, Atwood, in Year, draws on and literalizes the trope of corporate cannibalism in describing her Americanized and corporation-controlled world. In a similar way, she draws on and extends a related idea she has long made use of in her fiction — that of the male commodification and consumption of women — as she tells the intertwined stories of Toby and Ren, two female pleebland survivors of the pandemic plague and former members of the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious cult and resistance group. Invoking the idea of degeneration as she expresses her long-held fears about environmental and social decline, Atwood looks to religion — specifically eco-religion — as she seeks evidence of our ethical capacity to find a remedy to humanity’s ills. </jats:p