(II)legitimacy of Knowledge and Exclusion: A Study of Margaret Atwood's Select Novels

Abstract

This paper is a study of Canadian author Margaret Atwood's select fictional narratives reflecting how the ‘scientific’ knowledge tradition, in its practice, results in social exclusion of the individual subjects who do not conform to it. In order to explore the state of exclusion, it looks into how ‘the postmodern condition’ inherently brings with itself the idea of its own (il)legitimacy. This notion is explored on the basis of four considerations-Consensus, Speculativity, Doability and Narrativity-inherent in the discourses/disciplines. The postmodernist thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) has been extensively referred to in understanding the (il)legitimacy of not only the scientific but also the non-scientific, but socially accepted forms of knowledge vis-à-vis Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000).