The potential of aesthetic and artistic search: the cultural model of Michel Welbeck

Abstract

The article reconstructs the creative path of Michel Welbeck — a famous French writer, essayist and film director, who is generally known as a prose writer since the 90s of the twentieth century, when his novel "Expanding the space of struggle" (1994) was published. This ensured Welbeck a high place in the hierarchy of writers and "postmodern" orientation, especially among those who position themselves in the field of elite literature. The emphasis is on the transformational processes in the work of the prose writer, who gradually changes the "postmodern" means of expression to new approaches to "building" a literary work, increasingly demonstrating the "author's" position, based on the potential of creative experiment. Both the inner dynamism of Welbeck's novels and his attraction to new aesthetic and artistic pursuits other than "postmodernism" allow him to "move" to as yet untested cultural positions, in particular, to "metamodernism". In the context of "metamodernism" the focus is on the phenomenon of "metaprose", the core of which is "historioplasticity" — a concept that, on the one hand, can update the conceptual and categorical apparatus formed in the movement "postmodernism–post+postmodernism ", and on the other — to argue the emergence of a novel of the" new type ". The article uses elements of comparative analysis, which outline the place of M. Welbeck in modern European cultural space, where a whole cohort of writers is eager to search for new means of expression and create works of various genres. The dynamic nature of Welbeck's work is uncoverered in the article. In his novels created during 2000-2020 the author not only consolidated his own creative positions, but also revealed the potential of such a literary form as "pastiche novel".