Динамика автобиографизма в американском модернистском романе: от Г. Миллера до Дж. Керуака

Abstract

The study is devoted to the evolution of autobiographism in the American modernist novelof the 1930s–1950s. The article briefly describes the genre features of literary autobiographies and discusses the problem of ambiguous interpretation of the term ‘autobiographism’ in contemporary literary criticism. The study is based on Naum Leiderman’s theory of genre constructed on the idea that any genre is a certain combination of its structural units, i.e., ‘genre carriers’, these primarily including subject-oriented, spatial-temporal, and speech organization. Autobiographism, considered in the article as a principle of the author’s portrayal of his own life in a work of fiction, manifests itself precisely in the genre carriers, transforming them in a certain way. Following this, we define the autobiographical novel as a genre variety possessing the following features: the author aims to portray his life in dynamics of his personal relationships with the exte-rior world; the author’s life experience serves as the material; the leading principle of depiction is autobio-graphism. Based on a comparativeanalysis of the features of autobiographism in modernist novels, the paper traces the tendency, typical of modernist writers in the 1930s–50s, to abandon the ideas of elitism and text-centricity of the 1920s literature, and shows their increasing interestin their own writer’s individuality as well as the ways of expressing it in a literary work. The autobiographical novel, ideologically oriented to-ward the representation of the author’s ‘I’, became a genre in which this trend found expression through the complication of the forms of autobiographism, reflecting the structural, stylistic, and ideological features of modernist autobiographies. The material under research are the autobiographical novels Tropic of Cancerby Henry Miller and On the Roadby Jack Kerouac.