Modernism (French newest, modern) in literature is a direction, an aesthetic concept. Modernism is associated with the comprehension and embodiment of a certain supernatural, superreality. The starting point of modernism is the chaotic nature of the world, its absurdity. The indifference and hostility of the outside world towards a person lead to the realization of other spiritual values, bring a person to transpersonal foundations.
Modernists broke all traditions with classical literature, trying to create a completely new modern literature, placing above all the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are unique. The most popular topic for modernists is the conscious and the unconscious and how they interact. The hero of the works is typical. Modernists turned to the inner world of the average person: they described his most subtle feelings, pulled out the deepest experiences that literature had not previously described. They turned the hero inside out and showed everything obscenely personal. The main technique in the work of modernists is the "stream of consciousness", which allows you to capture the movement of thoughts, impressions, feelings.
Modernism consists of different schools: Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.
Representatives of modernism in literature: V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, E. Guro, B. Livshits, A. Kruchenykh, early L. Andreev, S. Sokolov, V. Lavrenev, R. Ivnev.
Postmodernism initially manifested itself in Western art, emerged as an opposition to modernism, open to the understanding of the elect. A characteristic feature of Russian literary postmodernism is a frivolous attitude to its past, to history, folklore, and classical literature. Sometimes this unacceptability of traditions goes to the extreme. The main techniques of postmodernists: paradoxes, puns, the use of profanity. The main purpose of postmodern texts is to entertain, to ridicule. These works for the most part do not carry deep ideas, they are based on word creation, i.e. text for the sake of text. Russian postmodern creativity is a process of language games, the most common of which is playing with quotes from classical literature. A motif, a plot, and a myth can be quoted.
The most common genres of postmodernism are diaries, notes, a collection of short fragments, letters, comments composed by the heroes of novels.
Representatives of postmodernism: Ven. Erofeev, A. Bitov, E. Popov, M. Kharitonov, V. Pelevin.
Russian postmodernism is heterogeneous. It is represented by two currents: conceptualism and social art.
Conceptualism is aimed at debunking, critical reflection on all ideological theories, ideas and beliefs. In modern Russian literature, the most prominent representatives of conceptualism are the poets Lev Rubinstein, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov.
Sots art in Russian literature can be understood as a variant of conceptualism, or pop art. All works of Sots Art are built on the basis of social realism: ideas, symbols, ways of thinking, the ideology of the culture of the Soviet era.
Representatives of Sots Art: Z. Gareev, A. Sergeev, A. Platonova, V. Sorokin, A. Sergeev
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Why is the literature of Russian postmodernism so popular? Everyone can relate to works that relate to this phenomenon in different ways: some may like them, some may not, but they still read such literature, so it is important to understand why it attracts readers so much? Perhaps young people, as the main audience for such works, after leaving school, "overfed" by classical literature (which is undoubtedly beautiful) want to breathe in fresh "postmodernism", albeit somewhere rough, somewhere even awkward, but so new and very emotional.
Russian postmodernism in literature dates back to the second half of the 20th century, when people brought up on realistic literature were shocked and bewildered. After all, the deliberate non-worship of the laws of literary and speech etiquette, the use of obscene language were not inherent in traditional trends.
The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s by French scientists and philosophers. Its Russian manifestation is different from the European one, but it would not have been so without its “progenitor”. It is believed that the postmodern beginning in Russia was laid when in 1970. Venedikt Erofeev creates the poem "Moscow-Petushki". This work, which we have carefully analyzed in this article, has a strong influence on the development of Russian postmodernism.
Brief description of the phenomenon
Postmodernism in literature is a large-scale cultural phenomenon that captured all spheres of art towards the end of the 20th century, replacing the no less well-known phenomenon of “modernism”. There are several basic principles of postmodernism:
- The world as a text;
- Death of the Author;
- Birth of a reader;
- Scriptor;
- Lack of canons: there is no good and bad;
- pastiche;
- Intertext and intertextuality.
Since the main idea in postmodernism is that the author can no longer write anything fundamentally new, the idea of “the death of the Author” is being created. This means, in essence, that the writer is not the author of his books, since everything has already been written before him, and what follows is only quoting previous creators. That is why the author in postmodernism does not play a significant role, reproducing his thoughts on paper, he is just someone who presents what was written earlier in a different way, coupled with his personal style of writing, his original presentation and characters.
"The death of the author" as one of the principles of postmodernism gives rise to another idea that the text initially does not have any meaning invested by the author. Since a writer is only a physical reproducer of something that has already been written before, he cannot put his subtext where there can be nothing fundamentally new. It is from here that another principle is born - “the birth of a reader”, which means that it is the reader, and not the author, who puts his own meaning into what he read. The composition, the lexicon chosen specifically for this style, the character of the characters, main and secondary, the city or place where the action takes place, excites in him his personal feelings from what he read, prompts him to search for the meaning that he initially lays on his own from the first lines he read.
And it is this principle of “the birth of a reader” that carries one of the main messages of postmodernism - any interpretation of the text, any attitude, any sympathy or antipathy for someone or something has the right to exist, there is no division into “good” and “bad” ”, as it happens in traditional literary movements.
In fact, all of the above postmodern principles carry the same meaning - the text can be understood in different ways, can be accepted in different ways, it can sympathize with someone, but not with someone, there is no division into "good" and " evil”, anyone who reads this or that work understands it in his own way and, based on his inner sensations and feelings, cognizes himself, and not what is happening in the text. When reading, a person analyzes himself and his attitude to what he read, and not the author and his attitude to it. He will not look for the meaning or subtext laid down by the writer, because it does not exist and cannot be, he, that is, the reader, will rather try to find what he himself puts into the text. We said the most important thing, you can read the rest, including the main features of postmodernism.
Representatives
There are quite a few representatives of postmodernism, but I would like to talk about two of them: Alexei Ivanov and Pavel Sanaev.
- Alexei Ivanov is an original and talented writer who has appeared in Russian literature of the 21st century. It has been nominated three times for the National Bestseller Award. Laureate of the literary awards "Eureka!", "Start", as well as D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak and named after P.P. Bazhov.
- Pavel Sanaev is an equally bright and outstanding writer of the 20th and 21st centuries. Laureate of the magazine "October" and "Triumph" for the novel "Bury me behind the plinth."
Examples
The geographer drank away the globe
Aleksey Ivanov is the author of such well-known works as The Geographer Drank His Globe Away, Dormitory on the Blood, Heart of Parma, The Gold of Riot, and many others. The first novel is heard mainly in films with Konstantin Khabensky in the title role, but the novel on paper is no less interesting and exciting than on the screen.
The Geographer Drank His Globe Away is a novel about a school in Perm, about teachers, about obnoxious children, and about an equally obnoxious geographer, who by profession is not a geographer at all. The book contains a lot of irony, sadness, kindness and humor. This creates a feeling of complete presence at the events taking place. Of course, as it suits the genre, there is a lot of veiled obscene and very original vocabulary here, and also the presence of jargon of the lowest social environment is the main feature.
The whole story seems to keep the reader in suspense, and now, when it seems that something should work out for the hero, this elusive ray of the sun is about to peek out from behind the gray gathering clouds, as the reader goes on a rampage again, because the luck and well-being of the heroes are limited only by the reader's hope for their existence somewhere at the end of the book.
This is what characterizes the story of Alexei Ivanov. His books make you think, get nervous, empathize with the characters or get angry at them somewhere, be perplexed or laugh at their witticisms.
Bury Me Behind the Baseboard
As for Pavel Sanaev and his emotional work Bury Me Behind the Plinth, it is a biographical story written by the author in 1994 based on his childhood, when he lived in his grandfather's family for nine years. The protagonist is the boy Sasha, a second-grader whose mother, not caring much about her son, puts him in the care of his grandmother. And, as we all know, it is contraindicated for children to stay with their grandparents for more than a certain period, otherwise there is either a colossal conflict based on misunderstanding, or, like the protagonist of this novel, everything goes much further, up to mental problems and a spoiled childhood.
This novel makes a stronger impression than, for example, The Geographer Drank His Globe Away or anything else from this genre, since the main character is a child, a boy who has not yet matured. He cannot change his life on his own, somehow help himself, as the characters of the aforementioned work or Dorm-on-Blood could do. Therefore, there is much more sympathy for him than for the others, and there is nothing to be angry with him for, he is a child, a real victim of real circumstances.
In the process of reading, again, there are jargon of the lowest social level, obscene language, numerous and very catchy insults towards the boy. The reader is constantly indignant at what is happening, he wants to quickly read the next paragraph, the next line or page to make sure that this horror is over, and the hero has escaped from this captivity of passions and nightmares. But no, the genre does not allow anyone to be happy, so this very tension drags on for all 200 book pages. The ambiguous actions of the grandmother and mother, the independent “digestion” of everything that happens on behalf of a little boy, and the presentation of the text itself are worth reading this novel.
Hostel-on-the-blood
Dormitory-on-the-Blood is a book by Alexei Ivanov, already known to us, the story of one student hostel, exclusively within the walls of which, by the way, most of the story takes place. The novel is saturated with emotions, because we are talking about students whose blood boils in their veins and youthful maximalism seethes. However, despite this some recklessness and recklessness, they are great lovers of philosophical conversations, talk about the universe and God, judge each other and blame, repent of their actions and make excuses for them. And at the same time, they have absolutely no desire to even slightly improve and make their existence easier.
The work is literally replete with an abundance of obscene language, which at first may repel someone from reading the novel, but even so, it is worth reading.
Unlike previous works, where the hope for something good faded already in the middle of reading, here it regularly lights up and goes out throughout the book, which is why the ending hits the emotions so hard and excites the reader so much.
How does postmodernism manifest itself in these examples?
What a hostel, what the city of Perm, what the house of Sasha Savelyev’s grandmother are strongholds of everything bad that lives in people, everything that we are afraid of and what we always try to avoid: poverty, humiliation, grief, insensitivity, self-interest, vulgarity and other things. Heroes are helpless, regardless of their age and social status, they are victims of circumstances, laziness, alcohol. Postmodernism in these books is manifested literally in everything: in the ambiguity of the characters, and in the reader's uncertainty about his attitude towards them, and in the vocabulary of the dialogues, and in the hopelessness of the existence of the characters, in their pity and despair.
These works are very difficult for receptive and over-emotional people, but you will not be able to regret what you read, because each of these books contains nutritious and useful food for thought.
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Abstract on the topic:
"Postmodern Literature of the End of the 20th Century"
Recently, it has become popular to announce that at the beginning of the new century, postmodernism finally passed all possible stages of its self-determination, having exhausted the possibilities of existence as a phenomenon of modern culture that has signs of universality. Along with this, the manifestations of postmodernism in the last third of the twentieth century. are often regarded 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 issue of postmodernism in a situation of apparent dominance of the postmodern worldview and the emergence of a huge number of works devoted to postmodernism come to the conclusion that “numerous publications turned out to be inconsistent and contradictory: the new aesthetic phenomenon was fluid, vague and defying definition.” D. V. Zatonsky, referring 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 streamline the picture of the world in the usual sense of the word. One way or another, we have to admit, following the scientist, 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 the existence of spirit and culture."
Indeed, the formation 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 the 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 cognition of the 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 objectively 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 before us any new perspective." In general, postmodernism was "a symptom of the collapse of the previous world and, at the same time, the lowest mark on the scale of ideological storms" with which the twenty-first century is fraught. This characterization of postmodernism can find many confirmations in theoretical works and literary texts.
At the same time, the definition of postmodernism as a phenomenon stating a general crisis and chaos that opened after the collapse of the traditional system of understanding and cognition of the world sometimes does not allow us to see some significant aspects of the postmodern period of the state of mind. We are talking about the intellectual and aesthetic efforts undertaken in line with postmodernism to develop new coordinates and define the outlines of that new type of society, culture and worldview that have emerged at the present post-industrial stage in the development of Western civilization. The case was not limited to the 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 that exists in the era of information and computer civilization loses its dominant value.
As a result, in works of literature, a coherent picture of life based on the plot as the unfolding of events has often been replaced not so much by the traditional genre plot principle of selecting and arranging material in the spatio-temporal dimension and linear sequence, but by creating a certain integrity built on a combination of different layers of material. , united by characters or the figure of the author-narrator. In fact, the specifics of such a text can be defined by using the term "discourse". Among the numerous concepts that reveal the concept of "discourse", one should single out its understanding, which allows one to go beyond linguistics. After all, discourse can be interpreted as a "supra-phrasal unity of words", as well as "any meaningful unity, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual." In this case, the discourse is a system of socio-cultural and spiritual phenomena fixed in one form or another, external to the individual and offered to him, for example, as a cultural heritage consecrated by tradition. From this point of view, the writers of postmodernism conveyed a rather acute feeling that for a modern person living in a world of formed, “ready-to-use” diverse social and cultural material, there are two ways 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 understand that any creation of works of the traditional form degenerates into the reproduction of one discourse or another. Therefore, in some works of modern prose, the description of a person's stay in the world of various types of discourses becomes the main thing.
In this regard, the work of J. Barnes is characteristic, who in the novel "England, England" (1998) suggested reflecting 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. When she meets her father, who once left the family, she reminds him that as a child she used to put together the Counties of England puzzle, and she was always missing one piece, because. his father hid him. In other words, she represented 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 of an ordinary person about their country.
This is how the fundamental question “What is reality” is defined in the novel, 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 socio-cultural 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 gives an extensive menu of real "English" dishes and drinks. All this is placed in a specially designed and specially created socio-cultural spatial analogue, which is a kind of grandiose reconstruction or reproduction of "old England" on a certain island territory chosen for this purpose. The organizers of this project proceed from the fact that historical knowledge is not like 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 on our way." 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 a person, certain technologies are also being used now. The world of culture is being designed and systematically created in the same way as it 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 authentic, and everything else is the creation of the best restorers, actors, costume designers and designers using the most modern technology to create effect of antiquity and historicity. This product of the modern show business of the era of the "consumer society" is a "repositioning" of the 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 the real country - Great Britain.
In this case, the literature of postmodernism highlighted one of the phenomena of the postindustrial world as a world of realized utopia of universal consumption. Modern man found himself in a situation where, placed in the sphere of mass 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 all cultural heritage. Thus, the concept of discourse as a sociocultural phenomenon gives Barnes the opportunity to show that the picture of the world within which a modern person exists is essentially not the fruit of his own life experience, but is imposed on him from the outside by certain technologists, “Concept developers”, as they are called in novel.
At the same time, it is very characteristic that, while recreating some of the 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 the classical tradition of 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 this postmodern type of activity that temporarily becomes dominant in protecting, preserving and realizing the primordial human need and ability for cognition and creativity.
In this case, the internal interconnections of text fragments, images and motifs in the postmodern text are reproduced as a 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 20th 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 a certain connection for the reader, 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 the individual not so much in social 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 makes up the specifics of postmodernist texts, which look like a multi-level system. Most often, three levels can be distinguished: artistic (figurative), informational and cultural. At the informational level, the use of extra-artistic text fragments, which are commonly called documents, is extremely characteristic of postmodernism. Narratives about the heroes and their lives are supplemented by heterogeneous material already processed and ordered for understanding. In some cases, parts of the texts may be any 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, quotations from books, including including from literary works of poetry and prose, written in a variety of eras. All this is assembled into a literary text, contributes to the creation of the culturological context of the narrative and becomes part of the discourse that accompanies the description, which has the genre features of a novel at the plot-plot level and reveals the problems of the individual fate of the hero.
This information and cultural layer most often represents the postmodern component of the artistic narrative. It is at this level that the combination of material from different eras occurs, 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 W. Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" excerpts from scientific, philosophical, theological literature of different eras are given as epigraphs to individual chapters. Other examples of the intellectual saturation of postmodern prose with informational, cultural and theoretical material are various types of prefaces of the authors, which have the character of independent essays. Such, for example, are “Notes on the margins of the Name of the Rose” by W. Eco or “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to the novel by J. Fowles “The Worm”, “Intermedia” between two chapters in the “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 provided with a rather detailed chronology of the life of the French writer.
In these cases, it is important for the authors to prove the possibility of fruitful spiritual activity and intellectual freedom on the basis of literary work. For example, A. Robbe-Grillet believes that a modern writer cannot, as before, turn 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 "does not oppose 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 all-encompassing pressure of the principle of pseudo-plausibility of form and content. Living in the hope of an intellectual and aesthetic liberation from the world, the modern writer pays the price by "feeling himself as a kind of shift, a crack in the usual orderly course of things and events ...".
Not without reason, in W. Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" for the narrator, the computer becomes a symbol of unprecedented freedom in handling the material of creativity and, thereby, the intellectual liberation of the individual. “Oh happiness, oh dizziness of dissimilarity, oh my ideal reader, overwhelmed by the ideal “insomnia” ... “The mechanism of one hundred percent spirituality. If you write with a quill pen, squeaking on greasy paper and dipping it into the inkwell every minute, thoughts run ahead of each other and the hand does not 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, a dull mechanical rhythm wins. But with him (perhaps with her?), the fingers dance as they please, the 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 critical analysis of the sensations of the wedding night ... ". "Proust is like a child's spill compared to such a thing." Access to an unprecedented variety of knowledge and information from the most diverse areas of the socio-cultural 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 postmodern method of creating an artistic pictures of life. In practice, postmodern manifestations of the methodology of the creative process look like a clearly defined repertoire of various ways, techniques and "technologies" of processing the source material to create a multi-level text.
However, the appearance in the 1980s a number of works of prose allows us to see that such features as quotation, fragmentation, eclecticism and playfulness, far from 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 a detective story) that do not correspond to rooted traditional ideas about prose genres have found their dominant significance. For example, “The Name of the Rose” (1980) and “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1989), the “illustrated novel” “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (2004) by W. Eco, the historical novel - “fantasy” by J. Fowles “ Worm "(1985)," History of the World in 10 ½ chapters” (1989) by J. Barnes, autobiographical trilogy by A. Robbe-Grillet “Romaneschi” (1985-1994). These works show that the choice of the postmodernist methodology of creativity is largely due to the desire to get away from the image of the virtual picture of the world imposed on a person from the outside in line with the rooted 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 from the material of reality a form of "innocent and honest story." The writer, for example, sees untapped opportunities for creativity in the fact that in the imagination of an author writing about the war of 1914, historically accurate military episodes may well be combined with images of heroes from medieval epic tales and chivalric novels. According to J. Barnes, the artistic deconstruction of the world is necessary because, as a rule, “we invent our own story in order to bypass the facts that we do not want to accept” and, as a result, “we live in an atmosphere of universal triumph of untruth.” Only art, as a result of human creative activity free from outside pressure, can overcome the rigid plot of an ideologized picture of the world, reviving old themes, images and concepts through their individual rethinking, combination and interpretation. In The History of the World, the author set the task of overcoming the superficial plot and approximateness of the generally accepted panorama of the historical past and present. The transition from one “elegant plot” to another over a complex stream of events can only be justified by the fact that by limiting his knowledge of life to selective fragments connected into a certain plot, modern man moderates his panic and pain from the perception of 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 of a creative person. Barnes sees a significant difference in the understanding of fidelity to the “truth of life” in classical art and now, when the practice of imposing a wrong view of the world on people has taken root in modern mass culture through literature, newspapers and television. He draws attention to the obvious differences between the picturesque scene depicted on the painting by Géricault "The Raft of the Medusa" and the real terrible facts of the maritime disaster of this ship. Freeing his viewers from the contemplation of wounds, abrasions and scenes of cannibalism, Gericault created an outstanding work of art that carries a charge of energy that liberates the inner world of the audience through the contemplation of the powerful figures of suffering and hopeful characters. In the modern post-industrial era, in the state of postmodernity, 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 turn out to be associated with the development of humanistic problems, which was one of the main assets of classical literature. Therefore, in the novel by J. Fowles "The Worm", the episodes of the emergence in England of the 18th century. one of the unorthodox religious movements is interpreted as a story about how "how the sprout of personality painfully breaks through the hard stone soil of an irrational society bound by traditions." Thus, in the last decades of the XX century. postmodernism reveals a clear tendency to return to the field of art and creativity of a person as an intrinsically valuable person, 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 criticism of the twentieth century. Crisis of methodology. Nizhny Novgorod: 1999.
Zatonsky DV Modernism and postmodernism. Kharkov: 2000.
Foreign literature. 1994. No. 1.
Vladimirova T. E. Called into communication: Russian discourse in intercultural communication. M.: 2010.
Bart R. Selected Works: Semiotics: Poetics. M., 1989.
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A characteristic feature of postmodernism in literature is the recognition of the diversity and diversity of socio-political, ideological, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic values. The aesthetics of postmodernism rejects the principle of the relationship between the artistic image and the realities of reality, which has already become traditional for art. In the postmodern understanding, the objectivity of the real world is questioned, since the worldview diversity on the scale of all mankind reveals the relativity of religious faith, ideology, social, moral and legislative norms. From the point of view of a postmodernist, the material of art is not so much reality itself, but rather its images embodied in different types of art. This is also the reason for the postmodernist ironic game with images already known (to one degree or another) to the reader, called simulacrum(from the French simulacre (likeness, appearance) - an imitation of an image that does not denote any reality, moreover, indicates its absence).
In the understanding of postmodernists, the history of mankind appears as a chaotic heap of accidents, human life is devoid of any common sense. An obvious consequence of this attitude is that the literature of postmodernism uses the richest arsenal of artistic means that creative practice has accumulated over many centuries in different eras and in different cultures. The citation of the text, the combination in it of various genres of both mass and elite culture, high vocabulary with low, concrete historical realities with the psychology and speech of modern man, borrowing plots from classical literature - all this is colored by the pathos of irony, and in some cases - and self-irony, characteristic signs of postmodern writing.
The irony of many postmodernists can be called nostalgic. Their play with various principles of attitude to reality, known in the artistic practice of the past, is similar to the behavior of a person sorting through old photographs and yearning for something that did not come true.
The artistic strategy of postmodernism in art, denying the rationalism of realism with its belief in man and historical progress, also rejects the idea of the interdependence of character and circumstances. Refusing the role of a prophet or teacher explaining everything, the postmodernist writer provokes the reader to active co-creation in search of various kinds of motivations for events and behavior of characters. Unlike the realist author, who is the bearer of truth and evaluates the characters and events from the standpoint of the norm known to him, the postmodernist author does not evaluate anything and anyone, and his “truth” is one of the equal positions in the text.
Conceptually, "postmodernism" is opposed not only to realism, but also to the modernist and avant-garde art of the early 20th century. If a person in modernism wondered who he is, then a postmodernist person trying to figure out where he is. In contrast to the avant-gardists, postmodernists refuse not only from the socio-political commitment, but also from the creation of new socio-utopian projects. The implementation of any social utopia in order to overcome chaos by harmony, according to postmodernists, will inevitably lead to violence against man and the world. Taking the chaos of life for granted, they try to enter into a constructive dialogue with it.
In Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism as artistic thinking for the first time and independently of foreign literature declared itself in the novel by Andrey Bitov " Pushkin House"(1964-1971). The novel was banned for publication, the reader got acquainted with it only in the late 1980s, along with other works of "returned" literature. The beginnings of a postmodern worldview were also found in Wen's poem. Erofeev " Moscow — Petushki”, written in 1969 and for a long time known only through samizdat, the general reader also met her in the late 1980s.
In modern domestic postmodernism, in general, two trends can be distinguished: tendentious» ( conceptualism, who declared himself as an opposition to official art) and " untendentious". In conceptualism, the author hides behind various stylistic masks; in the works of unbiased postmodernism, on the contrary, the author's myth is cultivated. Conceptualism balances on the verge between ideology and art, critically rethinking and destroying (demythologizing) symbols and styles significant for the culture of the past (primarily socialist); untendentious postmodern currents are turned to reality and to the human person; associated with Russian classical literature, they are aimed at a new myth-making - the remythologization of cultural fragments. Since the mid-1990s, postmodernist literature has been marked by a repetition of techniques, which may be a sign of the system's self-destruction.
In the late 1990s, the modernist principles of creating an artistic image are implemented in two stylistic currents: the first goes back to the literature of the "stream of consciousness", and the second - to surrealism.
Used book materials: Literature: uch. for stud. avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010
In a broad sense postmodernism- this is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical base; it is a peculiar attitude, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a trend 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.
Conceptualism or social art.
Conceptualism, or sots art- this trend consistently expands the postmodernist picture of the world, involving more and more new cultural languages (from socialist realism to various classical trends, etc.). Intertwining and comparing authoritative languages with marginal ones (obscenities, for example), sacred with profane, semi-official with rebellious ones, conceptualism reveals the closeness of various myths of cultural consciousness, equally destroying reality, replacing it with a set of fictions and at the same time totalitarianly imposing on the reader their idea of the world, truth, ideal. Conceptualism is mainly focused on rethinking the languages of power (be it the language of political power, that is, social realism, or the language of a morally authoritative tradition, for example, Russian classics, or various mythologies of history).
Conceptualism in literature is represented primarily by such authors as D. A. Pigorov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, and in a transformed form by Evgeny Popov, Anatoly Gavrilov, Zufar Gareev, Nikolai Baitov, Igor Yarkevich and others.
Postmodernism is a trend that can be defined as neo-baroque. The Italian theorist Omar Calabrese, in his book Neo-Baroque, outlined the main features of this trend:
aesthetics of repetition: dialectics of the unique and repeatable - polycentrism, regulated irregularity, ragged rhythm (thematically beaten in "Moscow-Petushki" and "Pushkin House", the poetic systems of Rubinstein and Kibirov are built on these principles);
aesthetics of excess- experiments on stretching boundaries to the last limits, monstrosity (corporality of Aksenov, Aleshkovsky, monstrosity of characters and, above all, the narrator in Sasha Sokolov's "Palisandria");
shifting emphasis from the whole to a detail and / or fragment: redundancy of details, "in which the detail actually becomes a system" (Sokolov, Tolstaya);
randomness, discontinuity, irregularity as the dominant compositional principles, combining unequal and heterogeneous texts into a single metatext (“Moscow-Petushki” by Erofeev, “School for Fools” and “Between a Dog and a Wolf” by Sokolov, “Pushkin House” by Bitov, “Chapaev and Emptiness” by Pelevin, etc.).
unresolvability of collisions(forming, in turn, a system of "knots" and "mazes"): the pleasure of resolving the conflict, plot collisions, etc. is replaced by the "taste of loss and mystery."
The emergence of postmodernism.
Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by J. Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is the complete rejection of the old, the creation of the new at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dissipation 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 (Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.
In this regard, we should also mention the concept of intertextuality, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotations taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands to infinity.
Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure, where there are no oppositions, no beginning and no end.
The main concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. A remake is a new version of an already written work (cf.: texts by Furmanov and Pelevin). Narrative is a system of ideas about history. History is not a change of events in their chronological order, but a myth created by the consciousness of people.
So, the postmodern text is the interaction of the languages of the game, it does not imitate life, as the traditional one does. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.
M. Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodern principle of paralogy and on the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western. Paralogy is “contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of a binary situation, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of some one beginning, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing one is recognized. The paralogic lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously, 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 dialogic interfaces between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting point” between the 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 character, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to contradictory integrity.
The category of simulacra is 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 opposed not to reality, but to its absence, that is, to emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality generation only under the condition of realizing their simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of the 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, which is characteristic of Russian postmodernism.
In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation - Integrity according to the definition of M. Lipovetsky: “... even the most radical variants of the decomposition of integrity in the texts of Russian postmodernism are devoid of independent meaning and are presented as mechanisms for generating some “non-classical” models of integrity.”
The category of Emptiness also acquires a different direction in Russian postmodernism. According to V. Pelevin, emptiness “does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be destined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no tool that has entered into a confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Due 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 realized in the provision on culture: "... in order to save - it is necessary to forget."
Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky deduces another, broader one - the 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 all that it can be. To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of "Chaosmos", which takes the place of harmony.
In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism (in the surrealistic utopia of freedom from Sokolov's "School for Fools") and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, whether it is "dialectic of the soul" by A. Bitov, coexist with postmodern skepticism. or "mercy to the fallen" by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.
A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - the author - the narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their permanent 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):
A classic version of a borderline subject floating between diametrical cultural codes. So, for example, Venichka in the poem "Moscow - Petushki" tries, being already on the other side, to reunite in himself Yesenin, Jesus Christ, fantastic cocktails, love, tenderness, the editorial of Pravda. And this turns out to be possible only within the limits of the foolish consciousness. The hero of Sasha Sokolov is divided in half from time to time, also standing in the center of cultural codes, but without dwelling on any of them, but as if passing their flow through him. This closely corresponds to the theory of postmodernism about the existence of the Other. It is thanks to the existence of the Other (or Others), in other words, the society, in the human mind that all kinds of cultural codes intersect, forming an unpredictable mosaic.
At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism, which has reached out from Rozanov and Kharms to the present.
Russian postmodernism also has several options for saturating the artistic space. Here are some of them.
For example, a work can be based on a rich state of culture, which largely substantiates the content (“Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, “Moscow - Petushki” by V. Erofeev). There is another version of postmodernism: the saturated state of culture is replaced by endless emotions for any reason. The reader is offered an encyclopedia of emotions and philosophical conversations about everything in the world, and especially about the post-Soviet confusion, perceived as a terrible black reality, as a complete failure, a dead end (“Endless Dead End” by D. Galkovsky, works by V. Sorokin).
