Метатекст битнического «автотекста» («Биг-Сур» Дж. Керуака)

Abstract

The article considers Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur” (1962) as an autobiographical novel that marks the transition of the beatnik writer’s work to postmodernism. The aim of the research is to determine the significance of metatext impact on the genre characteristics of the autobiographical novel. The article attempts to answer the question whether the structure and content integrity of autobiography as a genre remains in interaction with elements of postmodern poetics. For the first time in this study, both Kerouac’s novel and ‘autobiographic text’ (i.e., a work characterized by autobiographism) are considered on the background of the transition of the poetics from late modernism to postmodernism. The paper analyzes the forms and content of meta-textual commentary in “Big Sur”, which includes the author’s appeal to ‘early’ Jack Kerouac, reflections on beat-generation, extensive citation and self-citation. The results obtained allow us to state that the author of the work deliberately explicates himself in “Big Sur” with the help of various levels of metatext. At the same time, it can be stated that, being modified, the autobiographical novel does not abandon its main features in the postmodern version.