Margaret Atwood and Multimodality - Wee Kiat's Post

(Me "three", sincere apologies for this late post.)

Before I begin my post, I would like to refer to a snippet from the film, The Iron Lady.

 

Notice how the scene unfolds in a "steam-of-consciousness" manner, jumping from one situation to another, as if shifting from one memory to another. In fact, the premise of The Iron Lady is a fictional account of a Margaret Thatcher who is suffering from Alzheimer's Disease seeking to recall her deeds as the ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain. The film oscillates between past and present, as an aged Thatcher seeks to remember the "great" works she did as Prime Minister in the past. This is unlike other biopics, such as Walk the Line (biopic of Johnny Cash) and Der Untergang (biopic of Adolf Hitler's final days in Berlin), that have a linear narrative.

 

You might ask, "Why are you opening this post with a commentary about the style of narration in films instead of focusing on Atwood's short story?" Reading Atwood's short story, it reminded me of the "stream-of-consciousness" narrative style in The Iron Lady (no, I am not making a pun, relating Margaret Atwood with Margaret Thatcher). Instead of having a linear narrative, relating about how she perceived her mother when she was a child and how that perception changes as she grows up, Atwood chose to describe specific situations and encounters her mother went through. Atwood takes the reader from one memory to another about her mother.

 

So how does one use multimodality to teach Atwood's short story? This lesson begins with the assumption that students have read the short story as homework. At the beginning of the lesson, I will show a scene from The Iron Lady and tell students to take note of the narrative style of the film. With that, I will divide the class into groups and have each group to select a specific memory that Atwood has about her mother and tell them to draw it out on a drawing block. Students are to take note of setting and specific details as they draw out these memories. After the groups are done, I will have the students arrange their drawings according to the sequence of events in the short story, and after that tell them to arrange it according to how they prefer the story to unfold.

 

Through the above lessons, students can learn about narrative style through art and craft instead of a face-to-face lecture style. Multimodality is also achieved, through visual semiotics.