Postcolonial vision of Yaroslav Pavlyuk’s novel “The Garden of Drunk Cherries”

The relevance of the article lies in the study of the problem of the lost generation in modern Ukrainian literature, which remains insufficiently studied in literary criticism. The subject of the research is Yaroslav Pavlyuk’s postmodern novel “The Garden of Drunk Cherries”, to which the methods of postcolonial theory are applied. In the analysis, a literary character with a bifurcated consciousness stands out. This is the type of person in whom the traditional Ukrainian self-consciousness is combined with the Soviet one. The main result of the study is to identify the specifics of Ukrainian national identity in the Soviet Union, which was hidden and not exposed to the public, and Soviet identity became a social mask that people wore so as not to differ from generally accepted social standards. The novelty of the results of the study helps to reveal the social mask, which in Soviet-era Ukraine was the Russian language, which people had to use at the official level. The dramatic conflict between the novel main character, who is the author’s alter ego, and the librarian Oresta, is accompanied by letters from the artist Borys Zhdanyuk and famous directors Andriy Tarkovsky and Sergiy Parajanov, whose emotions and thoughts reveal the real picture of the absence of individual and national freedom in the USSR. Using the examples of people of art, it is shown how the Soviet system destroyed dissent and traumatized creative personalities. The bifurcation of the creative personality in Soviet-era Ukraine often led vulnerable people to their degradation. Censorship, control of dissent, the imposition of socialist realism in art, and the threat of arrest have forced writers, artists, and directors to adapt to the system or become dissidents. The novel depicts characters who do not accept the official ideology, trying to save their private world from state interference. The results of the study have the prospect for further analysis of the work of individual writers and generations who have become a lost force and have not used the creative potential inherent in them.

Umberta Eco Imię róży w szkolnej lekturze licealisty (jako tekst i kontekst kulturowy)

fourthgrade (fifth in technical secondary school) of secondary school. The novel by Eco fitswell with the specific implementation guidelines for literary and cultural education AT both levels of reading. It gives the opportunity to use many valuable cultural texts (including philosophical and literary ones) within the interpretative function. The novel is multi-thematic. It presents both the cultural past of the Middle Ages and the nature of man (his strength and weaknesses in discovering the truth about the world). The work consists of two parts. In the first part, the author propos es selected fragments of the novel (oritswhole) for reading. They serve to deep en the knowledge about the culture of the Middle Ages, also in the context of going beyond the stereotypical image of this era as a darktime. That is why special attention is paid to the matter of the novel’s role of laughter in the Middle Ages. In the second part of the article, the analysis focuses, among others, on playing with the literary text and genre convention (The Name of the Rose as a postmodern novel). The series of les sons also puts forward the topic of becoming inspired by the works of J. Borges and literary tradition as a living component of contemporary culture.

Virgo-Death: from The Little Show-Booth by Alexander Blok to The Mistress of Death and The Lover of Death by Boris Akunin

The image of Death, embodied in the image of a beautiful maiden, is considered in the article through the analysis of references in the novel diptych by B. Akunin The Mistress of Death and The Lover of Death (the Erast Fandorin series) to one of the most important primary sources, the drama by A. Blok The Little Show-Booth. The study shows that Akunin's method of deformation was replaced by a postmodern deconstruction with a splitting into two images, of Columbine and of Maiden-Death, each of which is dominated by one of the hypostases of the heroine of The Little Show-Booth. These transformations appeal in their development to the opposition in Akunin’s novels of two points of view on fate, dialectically interacting, which correlate with the adventurous exposition and with the inevitability of personal destiny idea, oriented towards the “classical” tradition. The result of the analysis is a new formula of the genre of Akunin's novels, since their poetics goes out of the ordinary framework of criminal literature, as a transgressive phenomenon in the field of mass literature, as postmodern novel, in which the uncertain intertextuality accentuates, align with plot details, the problem of heroes’ self-identity.

Peculiarities of translation of words play from Russian into Chinese (on the example of V. Pelevin's novel “Generation “P”)

Исследуются особенности перевода языковой игры русскоязычных произведений на китайский язык. Цель работы заключается в выявлении основных подходов к переводу игры слов в «классическом» современном романе В. Пелевина «Generation “П”» на китайский язык. Анализируемый материал представлен примерами из романа и его перевода, определяющиеся поэтикой различных названий; звучанием слоганов; обращением к текстам знаковых песен; обыгрыванием английской графики, английских выражений в русском культурном контексте; «обращенностью» к классике, ее крылатым выражениям. На основе проведенного анализа было установлено, что особенности передачи игры слов при переводе художественного текста с русского языка на китайский обусловлены целым рядом переводческих приемов и методов (в т.ч. замены, добавления и пр.), позволяющих представить «игровую» постмодернистскую эстетику, построенную по принципам интертекста. Материалы исследования могут служить основой для разработки переводческих соответствий в языковой паре русский-китайский. The article dwells upon the features of the translation of the language game from Russian into Chinese. The purpose of this work is to identify the main approaches to the translation of wordplay in the “classic” postmodern novel by V. Pelevin “Generation “P” into Chinese. Examples from the novel and its translation, determined by the poetics of various names, were used as the analyzed material; sounding slogans; referring to the texts of iconic songs; playing with English graphics, English expressions in the Russian cultural context; “appeal” to the classics, its catchphrases. Based on the analysis, it was found that the peculiarities of the transfer of wordplay when translating a literary text from Russian into Chinese are due to a number of translation techniques and methods (including replacements, additions, etc.) that allow us to present “playful” postmodern aesthetics which are built on the principles of intertext. Research materials can serve as a basis for the development of translation equivalents in the Russian-Chinese language pair.

Communicative Model – Author, Hero, Text, Recipient in a Postmodern Novel

The study deals with the communicative interaction between the author, the hero, the text, the reader in a postmodern novel. A similar and ambiguous reality, on the one hand, sometimes led to the subjectivist hypertrophy, absolutizing the author’s world view, and at times minimized and devaluated the author’s identity, on the other. Therefore, from the end of the 1990s the ways of expressing author’s “Self” changed dramatically, which directly affected the means of creating a hero in the contemporary Ukrainian literature. An important place in the communicative literary model was occupied by the text as an independent semantic unit and the reader as an interpreter of the text. The specifics of deploying the dialog between the author and the hero point to the transformation of their functions in the Ukrainian postmodern novel. Considering the statement of the death of the author proclaimed by R. Barthes, the former stops being the main holistic text creator, thus rather becoming its product and the way of expression. The author, the hero and the text have a certain integrity aimed at the interpretative game with the recipient, who diffuses the newly created semantic integrity into a diversity of meanings.

The linguistic features and translation specifications of the novel generation “p” by Victor Pelevin

The authors focus on the linguistic features characterising a postmodern novel on the example of the literary work Generation “P” by Victor Pelevin. Firstly, the impossibility of new style invention and the idea of the necessity of different styles combination are highlighted: stylistically marked words such as jargon words, low-colloquial lexis, poetic and archaic words, idioms, and even scientific terms all together create a unique style of the novel. Secondly, the implementation levels of the language game are considered. Two levels of language game representation are analysed: the mix of styles and the loss of figurativeness by phraseological units. The intertextual context of the novel and a common method of postmodernism known as “rewriting” are regarded in the article. A phenomenon of language game and intertextuality are analyzed based on the translation of the novel by Andrew Bromfield.

Zajełdyz. O postkolonialnych aspektach Jakucji Jegora Radowa

The author analyzes the relationship between post-colonialism and postmodernism on the basis of Egor Radov’s novel Yakutia. The two currents are interrelated and affect both the aesthetics and the structure of the works. Their Russian variants, due to their particular interpretation of the colonial issue, are very different from the Western models. Yakutia is an example of a postmodern novel in which the post-colonial context is a background for philosophical and socio-political reflections. The novel combines various motifs characteristic of the genre of dystopia, popular in Russian postmodernism.

Postmodern Absurdist Critique of Julian Barnes’s The Only Story

This research paper endeavors to examine the postmodern absurdism as a literary sub genre in postmodern fiction. It delves deep into the concept of absurdism by concentrating upon the characteristics that distinguish it as a postmodern sub genre. Through the analysis of the postmodern novel, The Only Story (2018), this research paper illustrates how the characteristics of absurdism haven impact upon a postmodern society characterized by boredom, meaninglessness, futility, and confusion. It also highlights how different characters, events, and places have been portrayed in the novel to depict the absurdity of human existence. The theoretical paradigm of the research is based upon Thomas Nagel’s Essay “The Absurd” which is about postmodern space of absurdism and was presented in the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division. The study limelight's how the absurd occurrences and bizarre characters found in the researcher's primary text depict the complexity of the postmodern absurd world in both literal and metaphoric dimensions.

Literature in New Media: A Comparative Study of Literary Affordances of Lance Olsen’s “10:01” in Traditional and Digital Medium

The recent advances of the digital era invoke an array of new media for communication. This impressive feat of technology purveys a wide range of new affordances to communication unviable in print. The new media affordances of the electronic and the digital have impacted the creative literary compositions, providing innovations in contemporary literature. Postmodern literature being the initiation of experimental works has strived to reinvent the affordances of literary fiction. It has now advanced into resorting to digital technological affordances to maximize narrative inventiveness. Lance Olsen’s “10:01”, a postmodern novel adapted as hypertext fiction, is an exemplar of such feat. This research examines the literary affordances of the chosen text in print and its hypertext adaptation within the framework of affordance theories. The study unveils the inlaid new media aesthetics and viabilities of the digital in relation to the traditional medium of print by focusing on affordances. The paper asserts the significance of theorizing the aesthetics involved in digital textuality by holding print and electronic literature at the intersection. This study aims to establish the shift in literary analysis paradigms of text due to the emergence of New media.

GENRES’ BALANCING IN E. MENDOZA’S NOVEL “THE AMAZING JOURNEY OF POMPONIUS FLAT”

The article explores the genre specificity of the postmodern novel, “The Amazing Journey of Pomponius Flat” by the contemporary Spanish writer Eduardo Mendoza. The novel is based on the principles of a ludic literature tradition, one of the manifestations of which is a sophisticated interplay of various ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres in neo-baroque fashion. The novel develops an ironic detective story, but also represents different genre markers of the travel novel, the picaresque and historical novels, whose traditions and cliches are introduced in an ironic way. The journey of the heronarrator, which is mentioned at the beginning and at the end of the novel, in fact, has no significance for the plot. The image of the protagonist combines two archetypical figures, keys to Spanish literature – the trickster and Don Quixote. In accordance with the tradition of a historical novel, E. Mendoza’s work creates the illusion of historical reconstruction, but there is no true historicism in the novel, since reliable facts are interspersed with speculations and fantastic elements that question the reliability of the whole story.