NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE BLIND ASSASSIN: FICTION, HISTORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE

Focusing on newspaper clippings as one of the layers of narration in Margaret At- wood’s The Blind Assassin, this paper examines their roles and discusses their significance within the novel. Relying on the idea that The Blind Assassin is, to a large extent, a novel about how history is recorded, the paper provides a brief overview of the position of history in postmod- ernism, highlighting the challenges to the separation of the literary and the historical. This is followed by an examination of news as a genre in which the historical and the popular merge, simultaneously reflecting popular tastes and shaping everyday stories into what is to become history. This theoretical framework places the novel’s newspaper clippings at the intersection of fiction, history and popular culture, and serves as a starting point for a discussion of their vari- ous facets. It is first analysed how the articles depict the society of the era and the roles characters occupy within it. Given that The Blind Assassin’s narratives frequently mirror each other, the pa- per then proceeds to examine how the main narrative is echoed in the clippings. Finally, treating the clippings as pseudo-historical documents, the analysis focuses on how they represent history, with the ultimate aim of revealing how Atwood makes use of both personal and public records to construct a paper-made past. It is eventually concluded that newspaper clippings serve as more than a mere mirror to the other narrative layers, as the features of news as a popular genre are present in the novel on the whole.