The Rest is ‘not’ Silence: Rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad as a Counterwriting Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ideological construction of the Western literary canon sparked heated arguments, particularly after the 1980s, in the context of 'opening up the canon' issue. Since then, contemporary women writers have questioned the monolithic perspective of the literary tradition which has systematically ignored the experiences of women, minorities, and those from lower classes. As a reactionary yet strategic move, contemporary women writers have produced 'counterwritings' through rewriting canonical texts in order to undermine the patriarchal conventions of the literary pantheon and transform it into a polyphonic narrative entity through which the voices of the silenced, exploited and marginalized are heard. In Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001), Christian Moraru defines 'counterwriting' as a revisionary and critical rewriting practice that "work[s] on – and, again, obsessively work[s] through — other bodies of writings" because mythic stories "explain us," they are "founding-texts" (2001, p. 8). This article explores Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's (1939- ) novella The Penelopiad (2005) as a contemporary revisionary myth-making practice in the light of Christian Moraru's 'counterwriting' concept. The article will provide a theoretical background to discuss ‘counterwritings’. It then deals with Atwood's motivation for producing a 'counterwriting’, as well as how she relies on the source text while being unconstrained by its restrictions using postmodern narrative strategies. The article also sheds light on how a founding myth of the Western literary tradition has been used as a reference point in a counterwriting to question the authority of its source text, Homer’s The Odyssey.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".