Disintegration Markers of Genre and Style System in Literature of the 2nd Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article focuses on the transformation processes that took place in literature at the level of its genre and style typology. In the 2nd half of the 20th century certain genres and types of writing acquired meanings and functions of styles. It could be one of the most widespread or even dominant genres (for example, ‘new novel’), a type of fiction (modern ‘literature of fact’), a genre of literature at the border with other kinds of spiritual and creative activity (essay, biography, etc.). The functioning in a literary process made them close to styles and literary trends and changed their basic code. Usually they acted as dominant ramified genres or types of writing subordinating other (marginal) genre forms.
 A paradigmatic feature of a ‘new novel’ is convergence of literature and science, writers and scientists. Due to scientific and technical revolution the criterion of accuracy and appreciation of real fact and document took an important place in a writer’s conscience. The ‘aesthetics of fact’, formed on this ground, gave a basis for the non-fictional genres in the 20th-century literature. The use of ready ‘blocks of life’ in the non-fiction of the 2nd half of the 20th century is tightly connected to acute conceptuality and often to apparent journalism. The writer’s imagination was focused on revealing semantic and artistic potential of the real facts.
 The intellectual prose, dramaturgy and partly poetry were full of genres and genre varieties with strict semantic and imaginative structure, aimed to express certain generalizations and actual world view ideas. These are novels-parables, novels-allegories, novels-symbols, and others like that. The theme and motive construct, especially in its mental and epistemological aspect, became frequent in a lyrical poetry. It was the way of forming the metagenre concepts of philosophical and meditative lyrical poetry, as well as, in particular, metaphysical, prophetical, suggestive, intimate, social, and journalistic one, with their inherent main codes.
 The process of leveling and destructing the traditional genres, styles, and their systems in postmodernism, as well as recombining their components, resulted in emergence of numerous hybrid forms. The ratio of original and repetitive or paraphrased material in the literary works began to change.