Tymeychuk I. Discourse of the Other in Dystopian Novels of Margaret Atwood

The dissertation is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of discursive models of the Other in dystopian novels The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) of the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. The research reveals that since the 1980 s Margaret Atwood has been raising the burning issues of nowadays, underlying the problems of totalitarianism, authoritarian mind, theocratic fundamentalism, the consequences of scientific experiments, power, freedom, colonization, apocalyptic catastrophic, the problems of women in a patriarchal society, the environment and so on. The choice of the Other as the main angle for the thesis is predetermined by the dominance of the concept of identity in modern humanitarian discourse in which the category of the Other prevails. The analysed novels The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are defined as critical and feminist dystopias. Moreover, it is stated that these novels are speculative fiction and possess autobiographical features. The Handmaid's Tale in its turn is characterised as a historiographical metanovel. Three major thematic clusters of Margaret Atwood's dystopias, which include national (colonial), feminist and ecological aspects, form a problematic model of her works in general. Moreover, this model is compiled within the frames of postcolonial and postmodern discourse of the Canadian literature standard. Consequently, there are four major perspectives of realization of the Other in Margaret Atwood's dystopian worlds proposed in this dissertation: spatial, existential, psychoanalytical and feminist. The analysis of dystopian novels The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood allows to state that the category of the Other as a key unit of the modern humanitarian discourse is a pivotal concept of Margaret Atwood's novels and fundamental for understanding apocalyptic visions created in her dystopian worlds.