القص الما ورائي، والخيال النظري، وإعادة بناء النوع الأدبي واللغة والواقع في ثلاث قصص قصيرة "لمارجريت أتوود". Metafiction, Theoretical Fiction and the Reconstruction of Genre, Language, and Reality in Three Selected Flash Fiction Works by Margret Atwood

Abstract

The postmodern ironic preservation of the relationship between language and reality is a salient characteristic of Margret Atwood’s works. Accordingly, this paper aims at the investigation of language and the fictional representation of reality in the mutant literary genre Atwood has created, i.e., the compressed short stories, short shorts, or flash stories of “ “Bread” and “Happy Endings”, and “The Female Body”. As part of the ”theoretical project”, or the new Atwood’s theoretical fiction and metafiction, these short flashes are examined as a call for forming a new language and literary forms to reconstruct reality .
Decentering of the center in both culture and fiction, the postmodernist writer’s experimentation with language, and literary textual form as well as the ironic preservation of the relationship between language and the intricate fictional representation of reality is explored in the above-mentioned three flash fiction works. The flashes in both Good Bones, and Murder in the Dark illustrate their intertextuality interweaving several genres and subgenres “including antifiction, metafiction, folk and fairy tales, myths, and other canonical texts; fables; parables;… popular romance; biography; autobiography; theology; speculative, …recipes; advice; thriller, and adventure stories” for the purpose of deconstructing stereotypical conceptions of masculinity, femininity, nature, stories and reader’s expectations as well as indicate reader’s epiphanies while reading them. Atwood’s postmodern aesthetics do not only involve the deconstruction of traditional literary forms and societal expectations and ideologies, but also incorporate a reconstruction of them.