DANCE AS A MARKER OF NATURAL CYCLES CHANGE IN TERRY PRATCHETT’S FANTASY NOVELS

Against the background of a widespread tendency to diminish the sacred meaning of ritual actions, Terry Pratchett’s strive to shed light on the archetypal principles of mythological consciousness in contemporary folklore makes it possible to restorethe connection of the old rites, which have lost their original sense, with the worldview bases of modern society and to reacralize the profane. The Elements of mythological consciousness, manifested in ritual actions inherent in the modern functioning of English folklore, play a meaningful and compositional role in Terry Pratchett’s novels «The Reaper» (1991), «Lords and Ladies» (1992) and «Wintersmith» (2006). In Pratchett’s novels, Morris dance, which traditionally heralds the summer beginning, is balanced by a dance that marks the beginning of winter, indicating the natural cycles change. This manifests the functions of a sacred act: a dialogue between the world and a human, extracting the last from the flow of everyday life, and finalizing the routine work of a farmer. The study suggests the analysis of artistic means describing the Morris dance ritual as a marker of natural cycle changes and as evidence of a human establishing contact with natural forces, enshrined in the narrative and embodied in the dynamic form of dance. A common harvest festival turns into a Dance of the Death and a Maiden, which moves the process of harvesting and preserving the harvest into the realm of the sacred. The motive of the Death and a Maiden dance is being developed in the same compositional plane with the Morris dance motive, as an element of the narrative about the natural balance of life and death,fertility and harvest, about the cycle of the universe based on the love drive. The article examines the compositional elements of choreographic ekphrasis, highlights the significant elements of such a description, indicates the markers of the sacred and the profane, intrinsic to ritual dance in Pratchett’s novels. The conducted research allows to determine the role of dance in Pratchett’s literature work as a marker of the transition from one state to another, as well as season cycle changes.

GASTRONOMICAL CODE AS ELEMENT OF EVERYDAY LIFE POETICS IN DRAMA TEXTS (ANTON CHEKHOV’S THREE SISTERS AND BETH HENLEY’S CRIMES OF THE HEART)

The paper sets out to explore the functions of food discourse in the plays Three Sisters by Anton Chekhovand Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley. Based on the critically established continuity between the two plays, the paperlooks at the ways the dramatists capitalize on food imagery to achieve their artistic goals. It seemed logical to discuss thealimentary practices within the framework of everyday life studies, moved to the forefront of literary scholarship by theanthropological turn in the humanities. Enhanced by semiotic approach, this perspective enables one to understand foodproducts and consumption manners as performing a variety of functions in each play. Most obviously, they are instrumentalin creating the illusion of «everydayness» vital for new drama. Then, for Chekhov, food comes to epitomize thespiritless materiality of contemporary life, while in Henley’s play it is predominantly used, in accordance with the play’sfeminist agenda, as a grotesque substitute for the lack of human affection. Relying upon the fundamental cultural distinctionbetween everyday and non-everyday makes it possible to compare representations of festive occasions in the twoplays seen through the gastronomical lens of «eating together». Despite substantial differences, the emphases on alimentarypractices in the plays serve to realize the inexhaustible dramatic potential inherent in the minutiae of quotidian life.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE FRONT LINE IN LITHUANIAN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

The image of the front line is deeply rooted in the contemporary Lithuanian discourse about cultureand politics. The strands of its cultural landscape connect art, media, politics and history. The concept of the line here performs like a literary metaphor deeply ingrained in everyday consciousness as a defensive front line due to the painful history of the nation’s experience. The confrontation with the constant threat of the Russian Empire and the catastrophes of occupation, especially in the 20th century, drew the Lithuanian prototype of the nation’s resistance and filled the 21st-century daily discourses with reflections on the emerged meaning of the Mannerheim Line. This actualised vision travelled to the spaces of artistic creation, music, cinematography, literature, creating feelings of infinity, spaces of transcendent landscapes, bridges of time and the dramaturgy of the Baltic archetypes of contiguity. These insights aim to unfold the Lithuanian discourse of contemporary culture with the special mark of the front line.

SELF-WRITING IN THE DIMENSION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: DYNAMICS, CHALLENGES, PERSPECTIVES

The article presents a study of the everyday life discourse in writing about the Self of a fictional subject. It seems obvious that involvement of self-writing in everyday practice calls into question the power of self-writing in the context of everyday life for the self-knowledge of the individual. The purpose of this scientific research is to debunk this illusion and explain the connection between the everyday life and self-writing. It transforms the practice of incorporating one’s own «I» in writing into the dimension of constructing the subject’s identity. There are no works on this topic in modern literary criticism and this fact also indicates the relevance and novelty of the research that is unfolding in the following article. Nowadays, the history of everyday life is booming. It is evidenced by a whole array of scientific papers on this issue. The study of self-writing in the dimension of everyday life appeals to the semiotic approach of Y.M. Lotman and G. Knabe for the analysis of the sign-symbolic nature of everyday life, to the sociological studies of A. Schutz, P. Berger and T. Lukman to identify the ways of constructing everyday life as reality or as a «life world», to the works of V.D.Leleko in the field of aesthetics and culturology of everyday life. The works of the philosophical and anthropological school serve the basis for the research. Particular attention is given to the text-letter of the Enlightenment. The protagonists of the Enlightenment Age invest the issues of everyday life in the work of writing that is a daily practice in the XVIII century. Due to its characteristics, the sphere of everyday life is a measure of self-knowledge and self-affirmation of the individual that was first artistically embodied by enlightened characters. The study shows that everyday life asa strong ground for self-affirmation of the subject was discovered with the help of the personal writing in the novel of the XVIII century, but this discovery became a lost testament to the text-writing of the Enlightenment. Changing the picture of everyday life under the influence of new technologies does not interfere with the text-writing. In the dynamic picture of everyday life offered to us by the 21st century, writing about the Self of a fictional subject opens up new facets of the power of everyday life discourse for the anthropological laboratory of literature. The study is illustrated by thesuch texts as: «Robinson Crusoe» by D.Defoe, «Nun» by D. Diderot, «Memoirs of two young wives» by O. de Balzac, «Poison of Love» by E.-E. Schmitt, «Self-portrait of the radiator» by K. Boben.

MUNDANE SCIENCE FICTION: LOSS OF DREAMS OR MATURITY?

The aim of the paper is to study the role of the mundane in contemporary culture based on the mundane science fiction (MSF). The term originated in 2004 thanks to «The Mundane Manifesto» by Geoff Ryman and his anonymous co-authors who argued for a focus on the modern science paradigm instead of dreams of outer space. The Manifesto outlines SF subgenre, where the setting is in the near future on the Earth or within the Solar System, excluding interstellar travel or contact with aliens. MSF suggests the believable use of technology and science, as it exists at the current time or a plausible extension of existing technology. There is a debate about the genre limits and its canonical works since it also covers cyberpunk, dystopia, etc. Remarkably, in the Soviet literature, such a genre called «near-future science fiction» existed in the 1940s and 1950s. It is a subgenre of «hard» SF focusing on the inventions useful for the national economy and lacking psychological depth of characters. This literature mostly had low artistic quality because of the Soviet ideological pressure and many limitations.The benefits of the paper are the following. First, the author distinguishes between two ma in approaches to SF, namely a more practical and literal reception and a more metaphorical reception. The former is characteristic of readers of realistic literature who try to find the true-to-life elements in SF blamed as escapism. The latter is close to the SF fans. However, blaming SF for escapism seems an excessive sociologizing of literature and ignoring the great role of metaphor in cultural development. Consequently, MSF is an effort to bridge a gap between SF and realistic literature. Second, the paper presents the first attempt to compare MSF to the Soviet «near-future SF». The author argues that since such a «near-future SF» occupies a niche in Western literature, it is a sign of the global changesthat are taking place during the lifetime of the current generation, bringing, in addition to progress, the acute threat of environmental catastrophe. Moreover, the role of neo Marxism, on the one hand, and technophobia, on the other hand, are emphasized. Third, for the first time the possible connections between MSF and the frontier myth important for the American national cultural mythology are studied. At the core of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel «Aurora» (2015) and James Gray’s movie «Ad Astra» (2019), MSF is regarded as a rejection of the ideology «space: the final frontier». Both works shift the focus from the global to the personal, from the unusual to the mundane, from expansion and colonization to the internal problems. The author concludes that the anthropological turn occurs in SF as well: there is a loss of metaphor, allegory, and archetypal basis, an abandonment of escapism, Enlightenment utopianism, belief in progress, romanticism, and industrialism in favor of more realistic view on the future of humankind. Unfortunately, in many cases, «mundane» means not only «mature» but «boring» here, making SF more science than fiction.

«SILENT ALL THESE YEARS» OR BECOMING IN EVERYDAYNESS: TORI AMOS AND HER POETICS OF THE QUOTIDIAN

Created by the American singer-songwriter Tori Amos «Silent All These Years» is a prominent cultural product of the 1990s in the domain of western popular music. Released in the beginning of the decade it has actualized the current sensibilities, ethically and aesthetically. Deploying the efficient mutual engagement of feminist and postmodernist strategies the author mobilizes the quotidian and performs its intellectual aestheticization. The study focuses on the ways the everyday operates in the song lyrically and musically, as well as on the author’s intention of aestheticizing the mundane. There is an important interdependence between the material circumstances in which the song was created and its genre form of an indie ballad — an ironic gesture that subverts the «heroic» becomes definitive of the piece. The embodied «women’s» experience of the mundane comes as grotesque, «women’s» time threatens to devour the time of «progress», elements of western eschatological mythology undergo domestication and the archetypal image of the Mermaid receives a re-reading, urban everyday vocabulary ruptures the «high» register. An intensification of sameness, repetition and monotony, however, accentuates a non-ironic potentiality of emancipation and insight. The poetics of the quotidian in Amos, thus, presents itself politically by locating the invisibly heroic becoming in everydayness as opposed to a one-time extraordinary action. One of the singular possibilities of such a becoming is a possibility of a continuing, and always risky, dialogic exchange.

MUSEUMFICATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: EVERYDAY LIFE AS A SPACE OF MEMORY OF A BYGONE AGE

The article is dedicated to the artistic and philosophical reflection on the everyday life of the communist era in the novel «The Museum of Unconditional Surrender» («Muzej bezuvjetne predaje», 1996) by Dubravka Ugrešić.The main attention is paid to the museumfication of elements of everyday life of the former Eastern bloc countries (SFRY, USSR in particular), i.e. transformation of material traces of the communist past into museum exhibits.After the fall of communist regimes in the Eastern bloc countries, and the disappearance of some of these states from the world map, entire layers of garbage and material remnants, including utilitarian objects accompanying the bygone everyday life, have remained. As long as the communist era has gone, the traces of its everyday life have acquired new meanings, associated with memory and nostalgia. These meanings define a new hypostasis of everyday objects: their hypostasis as museum exhibits.A world-famous Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić witnessed the formation and the breakup of Yugoslavia. In the novel«The Museum of Unconditional Surrender», written during her voluntary exile in Berlin, she depicts the museumfication of communist everyday life, revealing its new, metaphysical sense.The artistic world of the novel is organized within the metaphor of museum, which is emblematic for the postmodern philosophical and aethetical paradigm. The main action takes place in Berlin. Being a shelter for countless refugees and emigrants form the former socialist states, this city is seen as a total museum. Its dwellers repeatedly refer to themselves as to «walking museum exhibits». Thus, not only things, but also people get museumficated as remnants of a bygone era.The Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of the German Armed Forces, which gave the title to the novel, stands as a symbol of repressive mechanisms of the collective memory, promoting the coherent ideological metanarrative of the official history. Dubravka Ugrešić is aimed to deconstruct the museum as an ideological body, depicting some alternative storages of memory in the novel.First, it is the so-called «home museum» – a private collection of disordered photos and everyday things from the past. Besides, there are Berlin landfills and flea markets where things and people from the disappeared countries are found together. These alternative «museums» accumulate the uncoherent, subjective, heterogenic memory of the past. Such memory opposes the coherent metanarrative of a classic public museum.Looking through the different aspects of collective memory materialized in everyday objects, the article analyzes the relation between garbage and cultural memory, trivial objects and art, as well as the writer’s conception of museum.

THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY / ANXIOUSNESS IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE OF SERHIY ZHADAN’S NOVEL CHARACTERS («MESOPOTAMIA», «BOARDING SCHOOL»)

The article focuses on the study of artistic ways of expressing the types of human anxiety that is manifested in private experiences of the characters of Serhiy Zhadan’s novels «Mesopotamia» and «Boarding School». It is established that the prose writer embodied various types of anxiety – basic, catastrophic, neurotic – which arise in crisis life situations of the characters and are related primarily to the unconscious protective mechanisms of their psyche. It was found out that the private anxieties of Zhadan’s novel characters are most often expressed in intrinsic impulses of aggressive or sexual nature (Romeo, Oleg), past experiences, fear of responsibility, inferiority complex (Pasha, Yura), fear ofpunishment (Mario) or threats from the environment (Yura), a neurotic desire to compensate for one’s own inferiority in the sphere of personal ambitions (Bob) or power over others (Marat). As one of the most prominent artistic embodiments of the psychology of anxiety, the reasons for its emergence and the reflection of the subjective mechanisms of its development, the author of the article identifies the structure of the characters: Marat and Sonya – as the embodiment of a whole bunch of neurotic anxieties, involving the existence of internal conflict, disruption of interpersonal relationships with a clear manifestation of aggressive (criminal or sexual) behavior;Yura, whose behavior reveals symptoms of catastrophic anxiety where his feeling of threat from everywhere leads to his own existence being threatened; children (Sasha and Pasha in the memories of their childhood from the «Boarding School», Dasha’s son from «Mesopotamia») as carriers of basic anxieties arising from childhood due to a number of misunderstandings with the adult world, which further provokes the feelings of their personal inferiority, behavioral anomalies etc. It is emphasized that the nature of the characters’ anxiety and anxiousness is somewhat irrational, that it is always «intrinsic», and that bodily symptoms – the visible «body language» – play a significant role in the reflection of the «invisible language» of feelings.

AESTHETICS OF SHOCKS IN THE CONTEXT OF CURRENT EVERYDAY LIFE

Everyday life – regardless of its geographical status – has different dimensions: on the one hand, it is a routine, and on the other hand, it is an attempt to escape from it, to create at least some holiday. In the context of current everyday life, it makes sense to look at its other side: everyday life as stress, affectation of consciousness, etc. It is interesting to observe how the aesthetics of the shock, brought to Ukrainian literature, in particular, by the realities of the 1990s, is modified and filled with new meanings literally before our eyes, and how modern times deform human consciousness, herewith changing the «curve» of surrealism. This is about a phenomenon of the global world – a pandemic as a new experience that has actualized the issue of coexistence and co-responsibility. Experience, preventively studied through fiction and cinema (if «The Plague» by Albert Camus is about the past, then the «The Eyes of Darkness» dystopia by Dean Koontz is about the lethal microorganism «Wuhan 400» in the 1989 edition, which was called «Gorki-400» in the original 1981 version and is a warning fromthe past), now needs a new understanding. After A. Camus’s «The Plague,» one can also appeal to books on the same pandemic theme that have not yet been translated into Ukrainian: for example, Karel Čapek’s play «The White Plague» (1937), «The Steel Spring» by Swedish writer Per Wahlöö (1968), as well as «Blind Faith» dystopia by Ben Elton (2007), where the action takes place in the near future against the background of constant epidemics, and the research focuses on the current topic of vaccination. As a sensitive tool, literature received the reinterpreted theme of ageism for artistic reflection (one can find striking consonance, say, in Japanese literature, in particular in «The Ballad of Narayama» novel by Shichirō Fukazawa), as well as the theme of discrimination on other grounds and social inequality; the theme of a person endowed with power/opportunities and his/her choice to give or not to give the right to life to another; the topic of the area of personal/collective responsibility, boundaries of openness/closedness of societies, as well as the topic of the limit of pragmatism/rationalism, the limits/depth of cynicism. That is, it is about actualizing the presumption of the right to life, the preservation of humanity, which problematizes the other/different content of old, eternal plots of Ukrainian and world literature.

MEGXIT IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA AND INTERNET DISCOURSES

Every language preserves historic realia, reveals peculiarities of the geographical position of a particular country, main traits of the national character, and the overall cultural code of every nation speaking it. The language also describes all new realia and phenomena, and neologisms are coined all the time. «Brexit», «Megxit», «To Meghan Markle» are relatively new words in the English language. Romanticized image of a beautiful and tender princess, happily married to her royal Beau − a handsome, valiant and dashing young man is one of the most popular icons in European folklore. But modern fairy-tales are not that much simple. One omniscient author is definitely not enough, and millions of other on-line commentators contribute to the main line of the story, describing the prince and his princess, and often calling them names. Surprisingly as it may seem, the saying «My home is my castle» becomes not true, and the palace walls often shudder from rumors and insinuations, racial slurs and undertones. Under the circumstances a former friend often becomes a foe, compatriots become the invaders, responsible for a massive intrusion and violation of a basic human right for privacy. The main characters feel unhappy and the fairy tale soon becomes a thing to endure. These are the realia of our modern culture, with its etiquette and netiquette, black PR, on-line trolls and getting bad press. The Sussex family often cites racism as the main cause of all their troubles, but the plethora of various texts can reveal much more than just racism and related inequities. Personal qualities of the Duchess, her American origin and professionalbackground contribute to a massive cultural clash, and the new word «Megxit» appears, adding new shades of meaning to the «happily ever after» from the fairy tales. The article centers on the issues causing Megxit, and the texts give newinsight to a famous and well-known story.