M.Atwood's "Wilderness Tips" as a dialogical narrative

Abstract

The collection of short stories “Wilderness Tips” by Margaret Atwood is a perfect example of a dialogical organization of a fictional space. Despite the fact that initially the term “dialogue” was invented in reference to novels (M. Bakhtin Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics), specific features of the construction of fictional space within “Wilderness Tips” provide us with a possibility to venture a hypothesis that the term “dialogue” can also be applied to short fiction. There is no relevant criticism of Atwood’s short fiction employing a Bakhtinian perspective. Therefore what will be done in this work is the analysis of intersubjective relations between the characters of these short stories from a Bakhtinian perspective and his concept of Dialogue. Firstly, Atwood’s characters form their identity depending on their interaction with the outer world. Dialogue, in a broad meaning of this term, is something that forms the very core of their “who-I-am” sense. Secondly, a concept of language plays a crucial role in Atwood’s poetics. Her characters invent and re-invent themselves by means of language, which means, according to Bakhtin, the perfect model of a dialogical structure. Each chapter includes analyses of the short stories, which are based on observation of the concepts that were developed by Bakhtin within his Dialogical Theory (such as heteroglossia, intertextuality, carnivalization, etc.)