Postmodernism in literature examples of works. Postmodernism in Russian literature

POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE is a literary movement that replaced modernity and differs from it not so much in originality as in the variety of elements, quotation, immersion in culture, reflecting complexity, chaos, decentralization modern world; “spirit of literature” of the late 20th century; literature of the era of world wars, scientific and technological revolution and information “explosion”.

The term postmodernism is often used to describe the literature of the late 20th century. Translated from German, postmodernism means “what comes after modernity.” As often happens with something “invented” in the 20th century. prefix “post” (post-impressionism, post-expressionism), the term postmodernism indicates both the opposition to modernity and its continuity. Thus, the very concept of postmodernism reflects the duality (ambivalence) of the time that gave birth to it. The assessments of postmodernism by its researchers and critics are also ambiguous and often directly opposite.

Thus, in the works of some Western researchers, the culture of postmodernism received the name “weak related culture" (R. Merelman). T. Adorno characterizes it as a culture that reduces human capacity. I. Berlin is like a twisted tree of humanity. As the American writer John Barth put it, postmodernism is an artistic practice that sucks the juices from the culture of the past, a literature of exhaustion.

The literature of postmodernism, from the point of view of Ihab Hassan (The Dismemberment of Orpheus), is essentially anti-literature, as it transforms burlesque, grotesque, fantasy and others literary forms and genres into antiforms that carry a charge of violence, madness and apocalypticism and turn the cosmos into chaos.

According to Ilya Kolyazhny, the characteristic features of the Russian literary postmodernism- “a mocking attitude towards one’s past”, “the desire to go to the extreme in one’s home-grown cynicism and self-abasement, to the last limit.” According to the same author, “the meaning of their (i.e., postmodernists’) creativity usually comes down to “fun” and “banter,” and they use “special effects” as literary devices profanity and a frank description of psychopathologies...”

Most theorists oppose attempts to present postmodernism as a product of the disintegration of modernism. Postmodernism and modernity for them are only mutually complementary types of thinking, like the ideological coexistence of the “harmonious” Apollonian and “destructive” Dionysian principles in the era of antiquity, or Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China. However, in their opinion, only postmodernism is capable of such a pluralistic, all-examining assessment.

“Postmodernism is present there,” writes Wolfgang Welsch, “where a fundamental pluralism of languages ​​is practiced.”

Reviews about domestic theory postmodernism are even more polar. Some critics argue that in Russia there is no postmodern literature, much less postmodern theory and criticism. Others claim that Khlebnikov, Bakhtin, Losev, Lotman and Shklovsky are “their own Derrida.” As for the literary practice of Russian postmodernists, according to the latter, Russian literary postmodernism was not only accepted into its ranks by its Western “fathers,” but also refuted the well-known position of Douwe Fokkem that “postmodernism is sociologically limited mainly to the university audience.” . In just over ten years, books by Russian postmodernists have become bestsellers. (For example, V. Sorokina, B. Akunina ( detective genre unfolds not only in the plot, but also in the mind of the reader, first caught in the hook of a stereotype, and then forced to part with it)) and other authors.

The world as a text. The theory of postmodernism was created based on the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as cultural critic, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, “the world is a text,” “the text is the only possible model of reality.” The second most important theorist of poststructuralism is considered to be the philosopher and cultural scientist Michel Foucault. His position is often seen as a continuation of the Nietzschean line of thought. Thus, history for Foucault is the largest manifestation of human madness, the total chaos of the unconscious.

Other followers of Derrida (they are also like-minded people, opponents, and independent theorists): in France - Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes. In the USA - Yale School (Yale University).

According to the theorists of postmodernism, language, regardless of its scope of application, functions according to its own laws. For example, the American historian Headen White believes that historians who “objectively” restore the past are rather busy finding a genre that could organize the events they describe. In short, the world is comprehended by man only in the form of this or that story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of “literary” discourse (from the Latin discurs - “logical construction”).

Doubt about the reliability of scientific knowledge (by the way, one of the key provisions of physics of the 20th century) led postmodernists to the conviction that the most adequate comprehension of reality is accessible only to intuitive - “poetic thinking” (the expression of M. Heidegger, in fact, far from the theory of postmodernism). The specific vision of the world as chaos, appearing to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, was defined as “postmodern sensitivity.”

It is no coincidence that the works of the main theorists of postmodernism - rather works of art than scientific works, and the worldwide fame of their creators overshadowed the names of even such serious prose writers from the postmodernist camp as J. Fowles, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Sukenik, Philip Sollers, Julio Cortazar, Mirorad Pavic.

Metatext. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the American literary critic Frederic Jameson developed the theory of “narrative”, “metatext”. According to Lyotard (The Postmodern Destiny), “postmodernism is to be understood as a distrust of meta-narratives.” “Metatext” (as well as its derivatives: “metanarrative”, “metastory”, “metadiscourse”) is understood by Lyotard as any “explanatory systems” that, in his opinion, organize bourgeois society and serve as a means of self-justification for it: religion, history, science, psychology, art. Describing postmodernism, Lyotard states that it is engaged in a “search for instabilities,” such as the “catastrophe theory” of the French mathematician René Thom, which is directed against the concept of a “stable system.”

If modernism, according to the Dutch critic T. Dan, “was largely justified by the authority of metanarratives, with their help” intending to “find consolation in the face of chaos, nihilism, as it seemed to him,” then the attitude of postmodernists to metanarratives is different They usually resort to it in the form of parody to prove its powerlessness and meaninglessness. Thus, R. Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America (1970) parodies E. Hemingway’s myth about the beneficialness of man’s return to virgin nature, T. McGwain in 92 no. shadows - parodies his own code of honor and courage. In the same way, T. Pynchon in the novel V (1963) - W. Faulkner's faith (Absalom, Absalom!) in the possibility of restoring the true meaning of history.

Examples of deconstruction of metatext in modern Russian postmodern literature can be the works of Vladimir Sorokin (Dysmorphomania, Novel), Boris Akunin (The Seagull), Vyacheslav Pietsukh (novel New Moscow Philosophy).

In addition, in the absence of aesthetic criteria, according to the same Lyotard, it turns out to be possible and useful to determine the value of a literary or other work of art by the profit they bring. “Such a reality reconciles all, even the most contradictory trends in art, provided that these trends and needs have purchasing power.” It is not surprising that in the second half of the twentieth century. The Nobel Prize for Literature, which for most writers is a fortune, begins to correlate with the material equivalent of genius.

"Death of the Author", intertext. Literary postmodernism is often called "quotational literature." Thus, Jacques Rivet’s novel-quote Ladies from A. (1979) consists of 750 borrowed passages from 408 authors. Playing with quotes creates so-called intertextuality. According to R. Barth, it “cannot be reduced to the problem of sources and influences; it represents a general field of anonymous formulas, the origin of which can rarely be discovered, unconscious or automatic quotations given without quotation marks.” In other words, it only seems to the author that he himself is creating, but in fact it is the culture itself that is creating through him, using him as its instrument. This idea is by no means new: during the decline of the Roman Empire, literary fashion was set by the so-called centons - various excerpts from famous literary, philosophical, folklore and other works.

In the theory of postmodernism, such literature began to be characterized by the term “death of the author,” introduced by R. Barthes. It means that every reader can rise to the level of the author, receive the legal right to recklessly add to the text and attribute any meanings, including those not remotely intended by its creator. Thus, Milorad Pavich, in the preface to the book Khazar Dictionary, writes that the reader can use it “as it seems convenient to him. Some, as in any dictionary, will look for the name or words that interest them in this moment, others may consider this dictionary a book that should be read in its entirety, from beginning to end, in one sitting...” This invariance is connected with another statement of postmodernists: according to Barthes, writing, including a literary work, is not

Dissolution of character in the novel, new biography. Postmodern literature is characterized by the desire to destroy the literary hero and character in general as a psychologically and socially expressed character. This problem was most fully illuminated English writer and literary critic Christina Brooke-Rose in the article Dissolution of Character in the Novel. literary postmodernism work of art

Brooke-Rose cites five main reasons for the collapse " traditional character": 1) crisis " inner monologue“and other techniques of “reading the thoughts” of a character; 2) the decline of bourgeois society and with it the genre of the novel that this society gave birth to; 3) the emergence of a new “artificial folklore” as a result of the influence of mass media; 4) the growth of the authority of “popular genres” with their aesthetic primitivism, “clip thinking”; 5) the impossibility of conveying the experience of the 20th century by means of realism. with all its horror and madness.

The “new generation” reader, according to Brooke-Rose, increasingly prefers fiction documentary or “pure fantasy”. This is why the postmodern novel and science fiction are so similar to each other: in both genres, the characters are the personification of an idea rather than the embodiment of individuality, the unique personality of a person with “some civic status and a complex social and psychological history.”

Brooke-Rose's overall conclusion is that: “There is no doubt that we are in a state of transition, like the unemployed, awaiting the emergence of a restructured technological society in which there will be a place for them. Realistic novels continue to be written, but fewer and fewer people buy them or believe them, preferring bestsellers with their carefully calibrated flavor of sensitivity and violence, sentimentality and sex, the mundane and the fantastic. Serious writers have shared the fate of the elitist outcast poets and retreated into various forms of self-reflection and self-irony - from the fictionalized erudition of Borges to the space comics of Calvino, from Barthes's tormenting Menippaean satires to Pynchon's disorienting symbolic search for who knows what - they all use the technique of the realist novel to prove that can no longer be used for the same purposes. The dissolution of character is a conscious sacrifice postmodernism makes by turning to the technique of science fiction."

The blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction led to the emergence of the so-called “new biographism”, which is already found in many predecessors of postmodernism (from the introspection essays of V. Rozanov to the “black realism” of G. Miller).

Abstract on the topic:

"Literature of postmodernism of the late 20th century"

IN Lately It has become popular to declare that at the beginning of the new century, postmodernism has finally passed all possible stages of its self-determination, having exhausted the possibilities of existing as a phenomenon with signs of universality modern culture. Along with this, manifestations of postmodernism in last third XX century are often considered as an intellectual game, beloved by the elite part of the creative intelligentsia both in the West and in Russia.

Meanwhile, researchers who turned to the problems of postmodernism in the situation of the seeming dominance of the postmodern worldview and the appearance of a huge number of works devoted to postmodernism, come to the conclusion that “numerous publications turned out to be confusing and contradictory: the new aesthetic phenomenon was fluid, vague and could not be defined.” D. V. Zatonsky, turning to theoretical and artistic texts in order to identify and formulate general conclusions about postmodernism, called the term itself an “unintelligible word”, the use of which does little to help organize the picture of the world in the usual sense of the word. One way or another, we have to follow the scientists in admitting that the most significant reason for the spread of postmodernism was the state of general crisis, and its significance lies in the fact that it called into question the traditional “system of existence of spirit and culture.”

Indeed, the emergence of postmodernism is primarily associated with those profound changes in the picture of the world that accompany the post-industrial, information and computer stage of development of modern civilization. In practice, this turned into a deep and often irrevocable disbelief in the universal significance of both the objective and subjective principles of knowledge real world. For many, the events and phenomena of the modern world perceived by consciousness have ceased to have the character of images, signs, concepts that contain any objective significant meaning or spiritual and moral meaning, correlated with the idea of ​​real progressive historical development or free spiritual activity. According to J.-F. Lyotard, now the so-called "zeitgeist" "may express itself in all sorts of reactive or even reactionary attitudes or utopias, but there is no positive orientation that could open up to us any new perspective." In general, postmodernism was “a symptom of the collapse of the previous world and, at the same time, the lowest point on the scale of ideological storms” that the coming 21st century is fraught with. This characteristic of postmodernism can find many confirmations in theoretical works and literary texts.

At the same time, the definition of postmodernism as a phenomenon that states the general crisis and chaos that opened up after the collapse of the traditional system of understanding and knowledge of the world sometimes does not allow us to see some essential aspects of the postmodern period of the state of mind. It's about about the intellectual and aesthetic efforts undertaken in line with postmodernism to develop new coordinates and determine the outlines of that new type of society, culture and worldview that have emerged at the modern post-industrial stage of development of Western civilization. The matter was not limited to general denial or parody of cultural heritage. For some writers, called postmodernists, it has become more important to determine those new relationships between culture and man that develop when the principle of progressive, progressive development of society and culture in a society existing in the era of information and computer civilization loses its dominant significance.

As a result, in works of literature, a coherent picture of life based on the plot as the unfolding of events was often replaced not so much by the traditional genre plot principle of selection and arrangement of material in the spatio-temporal dimension and linear sequence, but by the creation of a certain integrity built on the combination of various layers of material , united by characters or the figure of the author-narrator. In fact, the specificity of such a text can be determined by using the term “discourse”. Among the numerous concepts that reveal the concept of “discourse”, it is worth highlighting its understanding, which allows us to go beyond the boundaries of linguistics. After all, discourse can be interpreted as “a superphrasal unity of words,” as well as “any meaningful unity, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual.” In this case, discourse is a system of sociocultural and spiritual phenomena, fixed in one form or another, external to to an individual and offered to him, for example, as a cultural heritage sanctified by tradition. From this point of view, postmodern writers have conveyed quite acute sensation the fact that for a modern person living in a world of formalized, “ready-to-use” diverse social and cultural material, there are two options left: conformist acceptance of all this or awareness of one’s state of alienation and lack of freedom. Thus, postmodernism in creativity begins with the fact that the writer comes to the understanding that any creation of works of traditional form degenerates into the reproduction of one or another discourse. Therefore, in some works modern prose the main thing becomes the description of a person’s presence in the world various types discourses.

In this regard, the work of J. Barnes is characteristic, who in the novel “England, England” (1998) proposed to reflect on the question “What is real England?” for a person of the post-industrial era living in a “consumer society”. The novel is divided into two parts: one is called “England”, and in it we get acquainted with the main character Martha, who grew up in a simple family. Having met her father, who once left the family, she reminds him that as a child she put together the “Counties of England” puzzle, and she was always missing one piece, because... his father was hiding him. In other words, she presented the geography of the country as a set of external outlines of individual territories, and this puzzle can be considered a postmodern concept that reveals the level of knowledge ordinary person about your country.

This is how the novel defines the fundamental question “What is reality”, and the second part of the novel is devoted to a certain project to create the territory of “Good Old England” next to modern England. Barnes proposes to present the entire culture of England in the form of a sociocultural discourse consisting of 50 concepts of “Englishness”. These included the Royal Family and Queen Victoria, Big Ben, Parliament, Shakespeare, snobbery, The Times, homosexuality, Manchester United Football Club, beer, pudding, Oxford, imperialism, cricket, etc. Additionally, the text provides an extensive menu of real “English” dishes and drinks. All this is placed in a designed and specially created socio-cultural spatial analogue, which is a kind of grandiose reconstruction or reproduction “ old England» on a specific island territory selected for this purpose. The organizers of this project proceed from the fact that historical knowledge does not resemble an accurate video recording of real events of the past, and modern man lives in a world of copies, myths, signs and archetypes. In other words, if we want to reproduce the life of English society and cultural heritage, it will not be a presentation, but a representation of this world, in other words, “its improved and enriched, ironized and summarized version,” when “the reality of the copy will become the reality that we will meet in our own paths." Barnes draws attention to the fact that the postmodern state of modern society is manifested, among other things, in the fact that in the sphere of culture, i.e. spiritual life of man, now certain technologies are also used. The world of culture is designed and systematically created in the same way as is done, for example, in the field of industrial production.

“England, England” is a space where the archetypes and myths about this country are presented as a spectacle and where only clouds, photographers and tourists are genuine, and everything else is the creation of the best restorers, actors, costumers and designers using the most modern technology to create the effect of antiquity and historicity. This product of modern show business in the era of the “consumer society” represents a “repositioning” of myths about England: the England that foreign tourists want to see for their money was created, without experiencing some of the inconveniences that accompany guests when traveling through a real country - Great Britain.

In this case, the literature of postmodernism highlighted one of the phenomena of the post-industrial world as a world of realized utopia of universal consumption. Modern man finds himself in a situation where, placed in a sphere popular culture, he acts as a consumer, whose “I” is perceived as “a system of desires and their satisfaction” (E. Fromm), and the principle of unhindered consumption now extends to the sphere of classical culture and the entire cultural heritage. Thus, the concept of discourse as sociocultural phenomenon gives Barnes the opportunity to show that the picture of the world within which modern man exists is essentially not the product of his own life experience, but was imposed on him from the outside by certain technologists, “developers of Concepts” as they are called in the novel.

At the same time, it is very characteristic that, recreating some essential aspects of the postmodern state of the modern world and man, the writers themselves perceive their work as a series of procedures for creating texts outside classical tradition prose. We are talking about understanding creativity as a process of individual processing, combination and combination of individual already formed layers of material, parts of cultural texts, individual images and archetypes. In the second half of the twentieth century. It is precisely this postmodern type of activity that temporarily becomes dominant in protecting, preserving and realizing the primordial human need and ability to cognition and creativity.

In this case, the internal relationships of text fragments, images and motifs in a postmodern text are reproduced as discourse, which is generally characterized as one of the evidence of the so-called “post-historical state” of artistic consciousness in the last third of the twentieth century. In postmodernism, there is a consistent replacement of the real historical perspective of the transition from the past to the future by the process of deconstructing an individual picture of the world, whose integrity is entirely based on discourse, in the process of recreating which this picture of the world acquires for the reader a certain coherence, sometimes opening the way for him to a new understanding of this world and his own positions in it. In other words, postmodernism draws new sources of artistry in recreating a picture of the world from various historical, socio-cultural and informational fragments. Thus, it is proposed to evaluate the existence and spiritual life of an individual not so much in social and everyday circumstances, but in the modern historical and cultural context.

At the same time, it is the informational and cultural aspect of the selection and organization of material that constitutes the specificity of postmodernism texts, which look like a multi-level system. Most often, three levels can be distinguished: artistic (figurative), informational and cultural. At the information level, the use of extra-literary text fragments, which are commonly called documents, occurs, which is extremely characteristic of postmodernism. The stories about the heroes and their lives are supplemented by heterogeneous material that has already been processed and organized for understanding. In some cases, parts of the texts may be some genuine formalized samples or their imitations: for example, diaries and diary entries, letters, files, trial records, data from the field of sociology or psychology, excerpts from newspapers, quotes from books, including works of poetry and prose, written in a variety of eras. All this is assembled into a literary text, contributes to the creation of a cultural context for the narrative and becomes part of the discourse accompanying the description, which has the genre characteristics of a novel at the plot level and reveals the problems of the individual fate of the hero.

This informational and cultural layer most often represents the postmodern component of artistic storytelling. It is at this level that the material is combined different eras, when images, plots, symbols from the history of culture and art are correlated with a system of norms, values ​​and concepts at the level of modern theoretical knowledge and humanitarian issues. For example, in “Foucault’s Pendulum” by W. Eco, as epigraphs to individual chapters excerpts from scientific, philosophical, and theological literature of different eras are given. Other examples of the intellectual saturation of postmodern prose with informational, cultural and theoretical material are various types of prefaces by authors, having the character of independent essays. Such are, for example, “Marginal Notes on “The Name of the Rose” by W. Eco or “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to the novel “The Worm” by J. Fowles, “Interlude” between two chapters in “History of the World in 10 ½ chapters" by J. Barnes. Following the model of a scientific treatise, J. Barnes ends his “History of the World” with a list of books that he used to describe the Middle Ages and the history of the creation of the painting by the French artist Géricault “The Raft of the Medusa,” and his novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” is supplied with a fairly detailed chronology of the life of the French writer.

In these cases, it is important for authors to prove the possibility of fruitful spiritual activity and intellectual freedom based on literary work. For example, A. Robbe-Grillet believes that modern writer cannot, as before, transform outwardly solid and real everyday life into a source of creativity and give his works the character of a totalitarian truth about the norms and laws of virtue and complete knowledge about the world. Now the author “is not against individual provisions of this or that system, no, he denies any system.” Only in his inner world can he find a source of free inspiration and a basis for creating an individual picture of the world as a text without the overarching pressure of the principle of pseudo-plausibility of form and content. Living with the hope of intellectual and aesthetic liberation from the world, the modern writer pays the price by “perceiving himself as a certain shift, a crack in the usual orderly course of things and events...”.

It is not without reason that in U. Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, for the narrator, the computer becomes a symbol of unprecedented freedom in handling creative material and, thereby, the intellectual liberation of the individual. “Oh happiness, oh the dizziness of dissimilarity, oh, my ideal reader, overwhelmed by the ideal “sleeplessness”... “The mechanism of one hundred percent spirituality. If you write with a quill pen, creaking on greasy paper and dipping it every minute into the inkwell, thoughts get ahead of each other and the hand cannot keep up with the thought; if you type on a typewriter, the letters get mixed up, it is impossible to keep up with the speed of your own synapses, the dull mechanical rhythm wins. But with him (maybe with her?) your fingers dance as they please, your brain is combined with the keyboard, and you flutter in the middle of the sky, you have wings like a bird, you compose a psychological critique of the sensations of the first wedding night..." “Proust, in comparison with such a thing, is a child’s spillie.” Access to a never-before-seen variety of knowledge and information from the most various areas sociocultural past and present, the possibility of their simultaneous perception, free combination and comparison, the combination of pluralism of values ​​and norms with their conflict and totalitarian pressure on human consciousness - all determine the contradictory foundations of the postmodernist method of creating artistic painting life. In practice, postmodern manifestations of the technique creative process appear as a clearly defined repertoire in various ways, techniques and “technologies” for processing source material to create multi-level text.

However, the appearance in the 80s. a number of works of prose allows us to see that such features as quotation, fragmentation, eclecticism and playfulness do not exhaust the possibilities of literary postmodernism. Such features of postmodern prose as the creation of a cultural, philosophical and artistic narrative (for example, a historical novel or detective story) that do not correspond to the rooted traditional ideas about prose genres have revealed their dominant significance. Such non-genre qualities are possessed, for example, by “The Name of the Rose” (1980) and “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1989), the “illustrated novel” “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (2004) by U. Eco, historical novel- “fantasy” by J. Fowles “The Worm” (1985), “History of the World in 10 ½ chapters" (1989) by J. Barnes, autobiographical trilogy by A. Robbe-Grillet "Romanesque" (1985-1994). These works show that the choice of postmodern creativity methodology is largely due to the desire to move away from the image of a virtual picture of the world imposed on a person from the outside in line with the entrenched genre discourse, when the content and plot are determined by the generally accepted aesthetic, ideological and moral canons of modern society and mass culture. Therefore, Robbe-Grillet refused to mislead readers simply by extracting reality from the material in the form of a “simple and honest story.” The writer, for example, sees untapped creative possibilities in the fact that in the imagination of an author writing about the war of 1914, historically reliable military episodes may well be combined with images of heroes from medieval epic tales and chivalric romances. According to J. Barnes, artistic deconstruction of the world is necessary because, as a rule, “we invent our own story to circumvent facts that we do not want to accept” and, as a result, “we live in an atmosphere of general triumph of untruth.” Only art, as a result of human creative activity free from external pressure, can overcome the rigid fableality of an ideologized picture of the world, reviving old themes, images and concepts through their individual rethinking, combination and interpretation. In “History of the World,” the author set the task of overcoming the superficial plotliness and approximateness of the generally accepted panorama of the historical past and present. The transition from one “elegant plot” to another over a complex flow of events can only be justified by the fact that by limiting his knowledge of life to selective fragments connected into a kind of plot, modern man moderates his panic and pain from the perception of the chaos and cruelty of the real world.

On the other hand, it is the transformation of actual historical or contemporary events and facts into a work of art that remains the most important asset creative personality. Barnes sees a significant difference in the understanding of fidelity to the “truth of life” in classical art and now, when in modern popular culture, through literature, newspapers and television, the practice of imposing a wrong view of the world on people has taken root. He draws attention to the obvious differences between the picturesque scene depicted in Gericault’s canvas “The Raft of the Medusa” and the real terrible facts of the sea disaster of this ship. Freeing his viewers from contemplating wounds, abrasions and scenes of cannibalism, Géricault created an outstanding work of art that carries a charge of energy that liberates inner world viewers through the contemplation of powerful figures of characters suffering and maintaining hope. In the modern post-industrial era, in the postmodern state, literature poses an essentially eternal question: will art be able to preserve and increase its intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic potential for comprehending and depicting the world and man.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that in postmodernism of the 80s. attempts to create literary texts, containing a modern concept of life, are associated with the development of humanistic issues, which was one of the main assets of classical literature. Therefore, in the novel “The Worm” by J. Fowles, episodes of origin in England in the 18th century. one of the unorthodox religious movements is interpreted as a story about “how the sprout of personality painfully breaks through the rocky soil of an irrational, tradition-bound society.” Thus, in the last decades of the twentieth century. postmodernism reveals a clear tendency to return man to the field of art and creativity as a valuable individual, freed from the pressure of society and generally accepted ideological and worldview canons and principles. postmodernism creativity cultural text

Used Books

1. Kuzmichev I.K. Literary studies of the twentieth century. Crisis of methodology. Nizhny Novgorod: 1999.

Zatonsky D.V. Modernism and postmodernism. Kharkov: 2000.

Foreign literature. 1994. No. 1.

Vladimirova T. E. Called to communication: Russian discourse in intercultural communication. M.: 2010.

Bart R. Selected works: Semiotics: Poetics. M., 1989.

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1. Features of Russian postmodernism. Its representatives

In a broad sense postmodernism- this is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical basis; This is a unique worldview, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a movement in literature and art, expressed in the creation of specific works.

Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.

Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by Jacques Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is a complete rejection of the old, the creation of a new one at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dispersion of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra (simulacrum - (from lat. Simulacrum, Idola, Phantasma) -conceptphilosophical discourse introduced in ancient timesthoughts to characterize, along with images-copies of things, such images that are far from similar to things and express the spiritual state, phantasms, chimeras, phantoms, apparitions, hallucinations, dream representations,fears, delirium)(Gilles Deleuze). The world is turning into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, and myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or other people.

In this regard, the concept of intertextuality should also be mentioned, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotes taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands indefinitely.

Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure (rhizoma is one of the key concepts of the philosophy of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The rhizome must resist the unchanging linear structures (of both being and thinking), which, in their opinion, are typical of classical European culture.), where there are no oppositions , beginning and end.

The basic concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. Remake is a new version already written work (cf. Pelevin’s texts). A narrative is a system of ideas about history. History is not a succession of events in their chronological order, but a myth created by the consciousness of people.

So, a postmodern text is an interaction of game languages; it does not imitate life, like a traditional one. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.

Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodernist principle of paralogicality and the concept of “paralogy,” highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western ones. Paralogy is “a contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of rationality as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of the situation of binary, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of one principle, and the possibility of the existence of something opposing it is recognized. The paralogy lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously and interact, but at the same time the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:

* focusing precisely on the search for compromises and dialogical connections between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting place” between what is fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.

* at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive nature, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to a contradictory integrity.

The category of simulacra is also somewhat different. Simulacra control people’s behavior, their perception, and ultimately their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the “death of subjectivity”: the human “I” is also made up of a set of simulacra.

The set of simulacra in postmodernism is not opposed to reality, but to its absence, that is, emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality only if they are realized as simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of initial disbelief in their reality. The existence of the category of simulacra forces its interaction with reality. Thus, a certain mechanism of aesthetic perception appears, characteristic of Russian postmodernism.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are also recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation – Integrity The category of Emptiness also takes on a different direction in Russian postmodernism. For V. Pelevin, emptiness “reflects nothing, and therefore nothing can be destined for it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, so much so that no weapon that enters into confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Thanks to this, Pelevin’s emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.

Opposition Personal – Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.

Memory - Oblivion– directly from A. Bitov is implemented in the provision on culture: “... in order to preserve, it is necessary to forget.”

Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky brings out another, broader opposition Chaos – Space. “Chaos is a system whose activity is opposite to the indifferent disorder that reigns in a state of equilibrium; no stability any longer ensures the correctness of the macroscopic description, all possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out to be at the same time everything that it can be.” To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of “Chaosmosis”, which takes the place of harmony.

In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism coexists with postmodern skepticism (in the surreal utopia of freedom from Sokolov’s “School for Fools”) and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, be it the “dialectics of the soul” in A. Bitov or “mercy for the fallen” by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.

A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - author - narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their constant affiliation is the archetype of the holy fool. More precisely, the archetype of the holy fool in the text is the center, the point where the main lines converge. Moreover, it can perform two functions (at least):

1. The classic version of a borderline subject, floating between diametrical cultural codes.

2. At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism

All over the world it is generally accepted that postmodernism in literature is a special intellectual style, the texts of which are written as if out of time, and where a certain hero (not the author) tests his own conclusions by playing non-binding games, finding himself in various life situations . Critics view postmodernism as a reaction of the elite to the widespread commercialization of culture, as opposition to the general culture of cheap tinsel and glitter. In general, this is a rather interesting direction, and today we present to your attention the most famous literary works in the mentioned style.

10. Samuel Beckett "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable"

Samuel Beckett is a recognized master of abstract minimalism, whose pen technique allows him to objectively survey our subjective world, taking into account the psychology of the individual character. The author's unforgettable work, "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable", is recognized as one of the best - by the way, the translation can be found on lib.ru

9. Mark Danielewski "House of Leaves"

This book is a true work of literary art, since Danielewski plays not only with words, but also with the color of words, combining textual and emotional information. Associations caused by the color combination of various words help to penetrate the atmosphere of this book, which contains both elements of mythology and metaphysics. The idea of ​​coloring the words was inspired by the famous Rorschach color test.

8. Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions"

This is what the author himself says about his book: “This book is my gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday. At fifty years old I am so programmed that I behave childishly; I disrespectfully talk about the American anthem, draw a Nazi flag with a felt-tip pen, and butts, and everything else.

I think this is an attempt to throw everything out of my head so that it becomes completely empty, like that day fifty years ago when I appeared on this badly damaged planet.

In my opinion, all Americans should do this - both whites and non-whites who imitate whites. In any case, other people have filled my head with all sorts of things - there is a lot of useless and ugly stuff, and one does not fit with the other and does not at all correspond to the real life that goes on outside of me, outside of my head.

7. Jorge Luis Borges "Labyrinths"

This book cannot be described without resorting to in-depth analysis. In general, this characteristic applies to most of the author’s works, many of which are still awaiting an objective interpretation.

6. Hunter Thompson "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

The book tells the story of the adventures of lovers of psychotropic drugs in Las Vegas. Through seemingly simple situations, the author creates a complex political satire of his era.

5. Bret Easton Ellis "American Psycho"

No other work can capture the life of the average Wall Street yuppie. Patrick Bateman, the main character of the work, lives ordinary life, on which the author imposes interesting trick, in order to show the naked reality similar image existence.

4. Joseph Geller "Catch-22"

This is probably the most paradoxical novella that has ever been written. Geller's work is widely recognizable, and most importantly, recognized by the majority of literary critics of our time. It is safe to say that Geller is one of the greatest writers of our time.

3. Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow"

All attempts to describe the plot of this novel will certainly fail: it is a symbiosis of paranoia, pop culture, sex and politics. All these elements merge in a special way, creating an unsurpassed literary work of the new era.

2. William Burroughs "Naked Lunch"

Too much has been written about the influence of this work on the minds of our time to write about it again. This work takes its rightful place in literary heritage contemporaries of the era - here you can find elements of science fiction, erotica and detective fiction. This whole wild mixture in some mysterious way captivates the reader, forcing him to read everything from the first to the last page - however, it is not a fact that the reader will understand all this the first time.

1. David Foster Wallace "Infinite Jest"

This work is a classic of the genre, of course, if one can say so about the literature of postmodernism. Again, here you can find sadness and fun, intelligence and stupidity, intrigue and vulgarity. The contrast between two large organizations is the main plot line, which leads to an understanding of some factors in our lives.

In general, these works are very difficult, and this is what makes them extremely popular. Would love to hear from our readers who have read some of the of these works, objective reviews - perhaps this will allow others to pay attention to books of a similar genre.

Postmodernism

The end of World War II marked an important turn in the worldview of Western civilization. The war was not only a clash of states, but also a clash of ideas, each of which promised to make the world ideal, and in return brought rivers of blood. Hence the feeling of crisis of the idea, that is, disbelief in the possibility of any idea to make the world a better place. A crisis of the idea of ​​art also arose. On the other hand, the quantity literary works has reached such a quantity that it seems as if everything has already been written, each text contains links to previous texts, that is, it is a metatext.

During development literary process the gap between elite and pop culture became too deep, the phenomenon of “works for philologists” appeared, to read and understand which you need to have a very good philological education. Postmodernism became a reaction to this split, connecting both spheres of the multi-layered work. For example, Suskind's "Perfume" can be read as a detective story, or maybe as a philosophical novel that reveals questions of genius, the artist and art.

Modernism, which explored the world as the realization of certain absolutes, eternal truths, gave way to postmodernism, for which the whole world is a game without a happy ending. As a philosophical category, the term “postmodernism” spread thanks to the works of philosophers Zhe. Derrida, J. Bataille, M. Foucault and especially the book French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979).

The principles of repetition and compatibility turn into a style of artistic thinking with its inherent features of eclecticism, a tendency toward stylization, quotation, alteration, reminiscence, and allusion. The artist deals not with “pure” material, but with culturally mastered material, because the existence of art in previous classical forms is impossible in a post-industrial society with its unlimited potential for serial reproduction and replication.

The Encyclopedia of Literary Movements and Movements provides the following list of features of postmodernism:

1. Cult of the independent personality.

2. Craving for the archaic, for myth, for the collective unconscious.

3. The desire to combine and complement the truths (sometimes polar opposite) of many people, nations, cultures, religions, philosophies, a vision of everyday real life as a theater of the absurd, an apocalyptic carnival.

4. The use of an emphatically playful style to emphasize the abnormality, non-authenticity, and anti-naturalness of the prevailing lifestyle in reality.

5. A deliberately bizarre interweaving of different storytelling styles (high classicist and sentimental or crudely naturalistic and fairy-tale, etc.; scientific, journalistic, business, etc. styles are often woven into the artistic style).

6. A mixture of many traditional genre varieties.

7. The plots of the works are easily disguised allusions (hints) to well-known plots of literature of previous eras.

8. Borrowings and overlaps are observed not only at the plot-compositional level, but also at the reverse linguistic level.

9. As a rule, in a postmodern work there is an image of a narrator.

10. Irony and parody.

The main features of postmodern poetics are intertextuality (creating one’s own text from others); collage and montage (“gluing together” equal fragments); use of allusions; attraction to prose of a complicated form, in particular, with a free composition; bricolage (indirect achievement author's intention); saturation of the text with irony.

Postmodernism develops in the genres of fantastic parable, confessional novel, dystopia, short story, mythological story, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novel, etc. Genre forms can be combined, opening up new artistic structures.

Günter Grass (“The Tin Drum”, 1959) is considered the first postmodernist. Outstanding representatives of postmodern literature: V. Eco, H.-L. Borges, M. Pavich, M. Kundera, P. Süskind, V. Pelevin, I. Brodsky, F. Begbeder.

In the second half of the 20th century. The genre of science fiction is becoming more active, which in its best examples is combined with prognostication (forecasts for the future) and dystopia.

In the pre-war period, existentialism emerged and actively developed after the Second World War. Existentialism (Latin existentiel - existence) is a direction in philosophy and the movement of modernism, in which the source of a work of art is the artist himself, expressing the life of the individual, creating artistic reality, which reveals the mystery of existence in general. The sources of existentialism were contained in the works of the German thinker of the 19th century. From Kierkegaard.

Existentialism in works of art reflects the sentiments of the intelligentsia, disillusioned with social and ethical theories. Writers strive to understand the reasons for the tragic disorder human life. The categories of the absurdity of existence, fear, despair, loneliness, suffering, and death come first. Representatives of this philosophy argued that the only thing a person has is his inner world, the right to choose, and free will.

Existentialism is spreading in French (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre, etc.), German (E. Nossack, A. Döblin), English (A. Murdoch, V. Golding), Spanish (M. de Unamuno), American (N. Mailer, J. Baldwin), Japanese ( Kobo Abe) literatures.

In the second half of the 20th century. a “new novel” (“anti-novel”) is developing - a genre similarity to the French modern novel of the 1940-1970s, which arises as a negation of existentialism. Representatives of this genre are N. Sarraute, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor, C. Simon and others.

A significant phenomenon of the theatrical avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century. is the so-called “theater of the absurd”. The dramaturgy of this direction is characterized by the absence of place and time of action, the destruction of plot and composition, irrationalism, paradoxical collisions, and a fusion of the tragic and the comic. The most talented representatives“Theater of the Absurd” is S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, E. Albee, G. Frisch and others.

A noticeable phenomenon in the global process of the second half of the 20th century. became “magical realism” - a direction in which elements of the real and the imaginary, the real and the fantastic, the everyday and the mythological, the probable and the mysterious, everyday existence and eternity are organically combined. It gained the greatest development in Latin American literature (A. Carpenter, G. Amado, G. García Márquez, G. Vargas Llosa, M. Asturias, etc.). A special role in the work of these authors is played by myth, which serves as the basis of the work. A classic example of magical realism is G. García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), where the history of Colombia and all of Latin America is recreated in mythical-real images.

In the second half of the 20th century. develops and traditional realism, which acquires new characteristics. The image of individual existence is combined with historical analysis, which is due to the desire of artists to understand the logic of social laws (G. Bell, E.-M. Remarque, V. Bykov, N. Dumbadze, etc.).

Literary process of the second half of the 20th century. determined primarily by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as well as the powerful development of intellectual trends, science fiction, “magical realism,” avant-garde phenomena, etc.

Postmodernism was widely discussed in the West in the early 1980s. Some researchers consider the beginning of postmodernism to be Joyce’s novel “Finnegan’s Wake” (1939), others - Joyce’s preliminary novel “Ulysses”, others - American “new poetry” of the 40-50s, others think that postmodernism is not a fixed chronological phenomenon, and the spiritual state and “every era has its own postmodernism” (Eco), while others generally speak about postmodernism as “one of the intellectual fictions of our time” (Yu. Andrukhovich). However, most scholars believe that the transition from modernism to postmodernism occurred in the mid-1950s. In the 60-70s, postmodernism embraced various national literatures, and in the 80s it became the dominant trend in modern literature and culture.

The first manifestations of postmodernism can be considered such movements as the American school of “black humor” (W. Burroughs, D. Warth, D. Barthelme, D. Donlivy, K. Kesey, K. Vonnegut, D. Heller, etc.), the French “new novel" (A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarraute, M. Butor, C. Simon, etc.), "theater of the absurd" (E. Ionesco, S. Beckett, J. Gonit, F. Arrabal, etc.) .

The most prominent postmodern writers include the English John Fowles (“The Collector,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”), Julian Barnes (“A History of the World in Nine and a Half Chapters”) and Peter Ackroyd (“Milton in America”), and the German Patrick Suskind (“ Perfumer"), Austrian Karl Ransmayr (" The Last World"), Italians Italo Calvino ("Slowness") and Umberto Eco ("The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum"), Americans Thomas Pynchon ("Entropy", "For Sale No. 49") and Vladimir Nabokov (English-language novels " Pale Fire"and others), Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (short stories and essays) and Julio Cortazar ("Hopscotch").

A prominent place in the history of the newest postmodern novel is occupied by its Slavic representatives, in particular the Czech Milan Kundera and the Serb Milorad Pavic.

A specific phenomenon is Russian postmodernism, represented both by authors of the metropolis (A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Ven. Erofeev, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Prigov, T. Tolstaya, V. Sorokin, V. Pelevin), and representatives of literary emigration ( V. Aksenov, I. Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov).

Postmodernism claims to express a general theoretical “superstructure” contemporary art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, fashion. Today they talk not only about “postmodern creativity”, but also about “postmodern consciousness”, “postmodern mentality”, “postmodern mentality”, etc.

Postmodernist creativity presupposes aesthetic pluralism at all levels (plot, compositional, image, characterological, chronotopic, etc.), completeness of presentation without judgment, reading the text in a cultural context, co-creativity of the reader and writer, mythological thinking, a combination of historical and timeless categories, dialogue , irony.

The leading features of postmodern literature are irony, “quotational thinking,” intertextuality, pastiche, collage, and the principle of play.

In postmodernism, total irony reigns, general ridicule and ridicule from everywhere. Numerous postmodern works of art are characterized by a conscious focus on the ironic comparison of various genres, styles, and artistic movements. A work of postmodernism is always a ridicule of previous and unacceptable forms of aesthetic experience: realism, modernism, mass culture. Thus, irony overcomes the serious modernist tragedy inherent, for example, in the works of F. Kafka.

One of the main principles of postmodernism is quotation, and representatives of this direction are characterized by quotation-free thinking. American researcher B. Morrissett called postmodern prose “quotational literature.” Total postmodern quotation replaces elegant modernist reminiscence. An American student anecdote about how a philology student read Hamlet for the first time and was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of common winged words and expressions. Some works of postmodernism turn into books of quotes. Thus, the novel by the French writer Jacques Rivet “The Young Ladies of A.” is a collection of 750 quotations from 408 authors.

The concept of intertextuality is also associated with postmodern quotation thinking. French researcher Yulia Kristeva, who introduces this term into literary circulation, noted: “Any text is built like a mosaic of quotations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text.” French semiotician Roland Karaulov wrote: “Every text is an intertext; other texts are present in it on various levels in more or less recognizable forms: texts of the previous culture and texts of the surrounding culture. Each text is a new fabric woven from old quotes.” Intertext in postmodern art is the main way of constructing a text and consists in the fact that the text is constructed from quotes from other texts.

If numerous modernist novels were also intertextual (“Ulysses” by J. Joyce, “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, “Doctor Faustus” by T. Mann, “The Glass Bead Game” by G. Hesse) and even realistic works (as proved by Yu. Tynyanov, Dostoevsky’s novel “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” is a parody of Gogol and his works), then it is precisely the achievement of postmodernism with hypertext. This is a text constructed in such a way that it turns into a system, a hierarchy of texts, while simultaneously constituting a unity and a plurality of texts. An example of this is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each article refers to other articles in the same publication. You can read such text in the same way: from one article to another, ignoring hypertext links; read all articles in a row or move from one link to another, carrying out “hypertext navigation”. Therefore, such a flexible device as hypertext can be manipulated at your discretion. in 1976, the American writer Ramon Federman published a novel called “At Your Discretion.” It can be read at the reader's request, from any place, shuffling unnumbered and bound pages. The concept of hypertext is also associated with computer virtual realities. Today's hypertexts are computer literature that can only be read on a monitor: by pressing one key, you are transported to the hero's backstory, by pressing another, you change the bad ending to a good one, etc.

A sign of postmodern literature is the so-called pastiche (from Italian pasbiccio - an opera composed of excerpts from other operas, a mixture, medley, pastiche). It is a specific version of parody, which changes its functions in postmodernism. Pastiche differs from parody in that now there is nothing to parody, there is no serious object that can be ridiculed. O. M. Freudenberg wrote that only that which is “living and holy” can be parodied. During the 24 hours of non-postmodernism, nothing “lives,” much less “sacred.” Pastiche is also understood as parody.

Postmodern art by its nature is fragmentary, discrete, eclectic. Hence such a characteristic of it as a collage. Postmodern collage may seem like a new form of modernist montage, but it is significantly different from it. In modernism, montage, although it was composed of incomparable images, was nevertheless united into a whole by the unity of style and technique. In a postmodern collage, on the contrary, various fragments of collected objects remain unchanged, not transformed into a single whole, each of them retains its isolation.

Important for postmodernism is the principle of play. Classical moral and ethical values ​​are translated into a playful plane, as M. Ignatenko notes, “yesterday’s classical culture and spiritual values ​​live dead in postmodernity - its era does not live with them, it plays with them, it plays with them, it absorbs them.”

Other characteristics of postmodernism include uncertainty, decanonization, carivalization, theatricality, hybridization of genres, reader co-creation, saturation with cultural realities, “dissolution of character” (complete destruction of the character as a psychologically and socially determined character), attitude to literature as the “first reality” (text does not reflect reality, but creates a new reality, even many realities, often independent of each other). And the most common metaphorical images of postmodernism are the centaur, carnival, labyrinth, library, madness.

A phenomenon of modern literature and culture is also multiculturalism, through which the multi-component American nation naturally realized the precarious uncertainty of postmodernism. A more “grounded” multicult) previously “voiced” thousands of equally unique living American votes representatives of various racial, ethnic, gender, local and other specific streams. The literature of multiculturalism includes African-American, Indian, “Chicanos” (Mexicans and other Latin Americans, a significant number of whom live in the United States), literature of various ethnic groups inhabiting America (including Ukrainians), American descendants of immigrants from Asia, Europe, literature of minorities of all stripes .