European Journal of American Culture - Volume 20, Issue 3, 2002

This interview took place during the 2001 literature festival in Hay-on-Wye in which Margaret Atwood featured prominently. Here she talks about her work as a writer, with particular reference to her latest, Booker-Prizewinning novel, The Blind Assassin, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize and which won the International Crime Writers' Association's Dashiell Hammett Award.

In the discipline of American Literature (and perhaps to a lesser degree in the humanities in general) the last few decades have seen an ever more strongly developed feedback relation between definitions of professionalism and the discourses of the discipline(s). Terms such as creative destruction embody a naturalizing view of cultural processes that validates the position of the professional in society and generates sets of uncritically affirmative ways of reading literary (and other) texts. In so far as both the central terms and the view of culture are axiomatically associated with a hegemonic view of America that in its turn centralizes the notion of pre-emption of dissent, literature, the academy, and the critic, in this perspective, have to give up all pretensions to any type of adversarialism. A reorientation in terms of an adversarial definition of the intellectual might open up new horizons and incidentally realign the two central terms in late twentieth-century criticism: politics and aesthetics. It might also reverse the Americanization of the globalized academy.

This article analyses the ideological implications of Faustian figurations in Crossroads (1986) in the context of other post-World War Two American films featuring a musical demonic compact and the blackface economy within American culture. The essay demonstrates that the film's narrative of a white Julliard musician's transgressive desire to play the blues transposes the minstrel form and the longstanding racial bias within Faustian discourses.

This article establishes intertextual connections between Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and describes how the Puritan conversion narrative form and the pilgrim narrative play a major part in Vonnegut's canonical anti-war novel. The protagonist Billy Pilgrim is seen as a modern personification of the Protestant work ethic, a successful, wealthy and hardworking businessman. He blithely espouses white Anglo-Saxon Protestant attitudes but becomes an evangelist for his science-fiction fantasies, which appear constructed from the religious materials around him and in his past. The narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five, like Tralfamadorian time, tries to destabilize the dominant Western master narrative typified by the linearity of The Pilgrim's Progress. If Dresden is seen as an inversion of Bunyan's Celestial City then its destruction is an indictment of capitalist progress born from pilgrim and conversion narratives.