Name: Annette Lapointe
Department: English, Ph.D.

Awards:
University of Manitoba Graduate Fellowship 2006-2007
Manitoba Graduate Fellowship 2006-2007

Research Area: Technology and the female body in the contemporary Canadian novel.

Canada is one of the most "wired" countries in the world, and that necessarily affects our literature.  My research focuses on the ways in which Canadian novelists address new technologies and corporate influence on mass culture, as well as the ways in which these forces affect the written female body.  Traditionally, femininity has been associated with nature and the home.  However, contemporary writing, particularly in the context of globalized late capitalism, exposes the ways in which women are (and have long been) manipulators of technology as well as its victims.  My work focuses particularly on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, but places them in a larger Canadian and international context.

After I earned my M.A., I took time off to travel, teach, and write.  I recently published my first novel, Stolen (Anvil Press, 2006).  At the moment, though, I'm working on critical rather than creative writing.  In addition to my research on technology and the female body, I'm revising papers on Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road and Larissa Lai's When Fox is a Thousand.