On The Features Of Dialogicality In Allan Poe's Terror Tales

The terror tales by Allan Poe are mostly told from first-person narration with insane protagonists, uncanny plot and dense gothic atmosphere. Poe's concern towards split personality and criminal psychology has deeply influenced Russian writer Dostoevsky and especially his creation of representative works as Crime and Punishment, The Double, etc. Bakhtin's dialogicality theory is based on the investigation of the works of Dostoevsky, but a dialogical reading of Poe's works has, so far, been little conducted. This paper tends to study Poe's seven most famous terror tales which have left a great mark on the writing of Dostoevsky in the light of Bahktin's dialogicality, detect the dialogical features in the layer of character, narration, language and plot and analyze the artistic value reflected.This paper falls into five chapters.The brief introduction serves as the very first chapter. It reviews the past studies concerning Poe and his works and investigates the longitudinal relationship among Bakhtin, Dostoevsky and Poe thus to demonstrate the significance and feasibility to explore Poe's works in the light of dialogicality.The second chapter establishes the link between dialogicality and Poe's world view and writing theory. Bakhtin asserts that dialogue is the basic form of existence and dialogicality, as a special form of interaction among different consciousness enjoying equal value, is the distinctive feature of Dostoevsky's works. The universe, in Poe's eyes, is an endless object based on the binary opposition of attraction and repulsion; his "unity of effect" theory celebrates the equal dialogue of different factors, and also he emphasizes the communicative power of the works with the reader both in poem and tale writing. All these demonstrate Poe's dialogical stance in thinking and writing.The third chapter investigates two types of typical characters in Poe's terror tales:split personality and androgyny. Through the complex relationship and conflict of different characters, Poe reflects the confrontation and interaction of good & evil, beauty & ugliness, masculine & feminine features within the same protagonist, which transcend the optimistic and patriarchal romantic period and demonstrate strong modern feature.Chapter four analyses the dialogical features in the layer of narration, language and plot. By using first-person narrator, Poe eliminates the author's controlling power and holds the narrators as independent objects. They constantly use private language to reveal internal self-retrospection and establish external reader empathy. Also, Poe sets intertextuality and open structure in language and plot level to make his works remain undetermined and open which invite the readers for interpretation.Based on the analysis above, this paper reaches the following conclusion:Allan Poe is a strong dialogue-conscious writer and dialogicality exists in different levels of Poe's terror tales. These dialogical features help Poe to reflect the complexity of humanity and make Poe's pioneering works transcend his Romantic era and enjoy everlasting charm.