GEORGES BERNANOS’ WRITING AS MODERNIST CODE OF FRANCOPHONIC METAMODERNISTIC SENSIBILITY

Abstract

The article analyzes the presence of an intertext between literary prose and political essay writing by a representative of the French Catholic literary revival of the first half of the 20th century. - Georges Bernanos - within the limits of modern intergenre French literature. The example is the collection of essays by the French-speaking writer Juan Asensio. However, the broader context of the reactualization of modernist writing in the contemprorary literary process is shown. The metamodernist sensibility of the 2000s is considered to be a result of the end of the dominance of the postmodernist discourse, its main theorists are investigated and the reasons for its appearance are shown. The dialogic character of metamodernism with the clue ideas of both modernism and postmodernism is noted, which is a middle way between modernist enthusiasm and postmodernist irony and skepticism, between hope and melancholy, between empathy and apathy, between truth and relativism, between totality and fragmentation, between experience and omniscience. Linguistic etymology and semantic plurality of the concept of “metamodernism” at the epistemological, ontological and historical levels are shown. The basic characteristics of the metamodernist worldview are named, such as: the return of metanarratives, belief in the truth, sincerity, empathy, the return ofhistory, the seriousness of religious experience, the search for the real, the importance of subjective experience. On the basis of these categories, the intertextual connection of the texts of Bernanos and Asensio is revealed according to four categories based on G. Genette’s narratology. It is about architextuality, thus citation at the genre level, narrative and poetic-stylistic closeness, explicit citation and allusions, and Bernanos’ meta-literary criticism provided in a comparative way. It is proved that the writing of Georges Bernanos became not only an intertext, but also a productive pretext of modern French literature, although the radical prophetism of the former was turned into a voice that just found the right to the truth and sincerity.