Modern American Literature Research Articles

Comparative Analysis of the Treatment of the Alcestis-Stuff by Euripides and by Wilder

This is the starting point of the following analysis: Life and death belong indissolubly together, but nobody of us knows what is waiting for us when we will have died. According to Christian religion the dead shall resurrect again and start immediately into an eternal life full of happiness in an unknown atmosphere without any sorrows and any problems to overcome. The ancient writers, that lived before Jesus Christ, had at hand an underworld as the realm of that god that is responsible for death. In very rare and exceptional cases a very deserved dead is given the allowance to enter again into his former earthen life. This procedure of bringing a dead person back to life might be a kind of deal between deities and mankind in this way that another person had to die and then to live in the underworld instead of the doomed person. This stuff is a subject-matter of legends, fairy tales and finally of classical drama. The heroes of the drama are Admetus and Alcestis – a royal couple; Admetus is doomed to death and his wife Alcestis wants to die instead of her husband. This treatise is written by an author who is as well a lawyer as a philologist. The treatise uses modern methods of literary comparison, that the author did learn at the examples of ancient texts and modern texts at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Saarland (Germany). The comparison between the Euripides-version and the Wilder-version is not an end in itself, the comparison aims to show the given literary differences based on the history of the development of the Alcestis-stuff in the light of the fact that the ancient text is the source for the modern text. Thus it becomes once more clear that the texts of old Greek authors do live on in a figurative sense until modern times. Wilder himself is a modern American author who consciously sought connection to antiquity, also because he did go through very intensive university courses in archaeology. This connection to ancient Greek literature, of course, makes modern American literature very attractive for European readers and for readers from other areas of the world.

Книги Достоевского в произведениях американской литературы XX века (Н. Уэст, Д. Ирвинг, Ф. Рот)

The article examines the presence of Dostoevsky’s books in the plot of the novels by Nathanael West, John Irving, and Philip Roth, in order to show how Dostoevsky was perceived by American writers and determined the specifics of the poetics and the transformation of constant motifs and images in modern American literature. It is proved that the use of Dostoevsky’s books as a stable motif introduces into these works an obligatory element of literary polemics for both the hero and the author. The main technique used by writers (parodying themes and images of Dostoevsky’s works) becomes the main way to rethink the existing tradition of perceiving the work of the Russian novelist.

Unfulfilled growing-up: The novel “The Lovely Bones” by A. Sebold

The article studies the poetics of the novel “The Lovely Bones” by E. Sebold. We applied comparative-historical and structural methods. The scientific novelty of the article is our research into the novel as a work about a frustrated adulthood. We consider its ideological and artistic specificity: the narration of a dead person, the description of the world beyond and the type of the character (a teenager being on the verge of growing up). The article investigates the spatiotemporal structure of the narrative and distinguishes its earthly and heavenly places. We analyze the system of characters in the novel and prove that the protagonist’s maturation is associated with the internal evolution of minor characters whose story unfolds both in the novel’s present and in the past, which the reader discovers due to flashbacks. Our study considers the specifics of the narration: as the main character is no longer alive, she has an omniscient position – her ability of flowing into the consciousness of other characters. The novel is analyzed in terms of transformation of initiation novel’s genre structures: Suzy is simultaneously a “mentor” for her loved ones and experiences her own growing up. In the finale of the novel, the emotive aspect of the work becomes crucial: gloomy hopelessness is replaced by the motifs of hope, forgiveness and faith. The article concludes that the theme of the formation and internal evolution of a person plays a plot-forming role in modern American literature.

Defining Contemporary American Literature: A Study of Louise Gluck’s, The Seven Ages

This paper defines contemporary American literature with specific references to Louise Gluck’s The Seven Ages. Although a handful of studies have been done on the subject yet, a satisfactory definition of contemporary American Literature has remained a task. The reason for this challenge is tied to the diverse lenses with which scholars have examined the subject matter with special attention to issues of language composition, authorship, setting, culture, characterization, and geographical experiences. More so, separating contemporary American literature from other American literary periods, especially modernism. The significance of this present paper is hinged on the fact that it has demonstrated sparkling differences between contemporary American literature and other epochs, with glaring shreds of evidence from Gluck’s collection. The essay identified, transformation, experimentation, coming of age, technology, cyber literature, history and memory, intertextuality, identity, literature of voice, family and beauty, spirit, nature, and wit as major themes that dominate contemporary American literature. Also, the literature of self, isolation, disillusionment, and the world as characteristics that characterize contemporary American literature. In terms of style, the work examined monologue, free versification, and simplified diction as core literary patterns. The qualitative research method was adopted, while historical criticism was applied for analysis. Findings show that contemporary American literature is different from other periods in American literature, even though, it shares proximity with modern American literature. In the same vein, not all literature weaved in the 1950s belongs to this period, but those produced in the last twenty-two years between (2000-2022). The submission of this study is that further studies be done on the area of defining the nature and characteristics of contemporary American literature, using texts weaved in the last twenty-two years. ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE | Dec. 28, 2023

THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN AMERICAN LITERATURE THROUGH THE LENS OF METAMODERN PERCEPTION

Time, as a basic concept of physics and philosophy, being an obligatory coordinate of our world, is present in modern American literature, both as an artistic effect that adorns the narrative, a tool for creating artistic reality, and as a system that changes the way of thinking. The action of the laws of time extends both to a person and to a literary work, but modern literature adapts these laws to fiction needs and experiments with its flow within a work. This article examines the artistic aspects of various concepts of time in modern American literature (starting from the end of XX to its current state) and their influence on the reader through the lens of the transition from postmodern to metamodern philosophical worldview provoked by the actual level of science development, globalization, and digitalization as well as the interaction of human perception of these processes and reactions to them with contemporary literary trends.

The plot of initiation in the novel “The Song of Achilles” by M. Miller

The article studies the poetics of M. Miller’s novel in the context of the initiation plot representation. The search for the hero is considered as one of the main problems of modern American literature. We use the cultural-historical and comparative methods and the method of narrative analysis in our research. The relevance of the study is the synthesis of approaches to the analysis of the novel “The Song of Achilles” by M. Miller. The study hypothesizes that, the technique of remythologization enables the writer to represent the universality of the human development stages and the crisis trials that adolescents face. The novel is considered both in the context of rethinking of the mythological narrative and in the aspect of representing the archaic model of initiation. The mythological plot basis, which implies plot determinism, makes it possible to emphasize the axiological, emotive discourse and protagonists’ inner changes. The parallel initiation of Patroclus and Achilles explicates the dichotomy of the godlike and the human elements in the inner nature of the characters. Patroclus, being close to the hero, shares his fate. He literally and metaphorically becomes Achilles in the finale of the novel, entering the battle in his armor and under his name. Achilles, on the contrary, shows human features due to the fact that he matures next to Patroclus. The article concludes that the theme of formation and internal evolution of the person in the context of the initiation rite and mythological narratives plays a plot-forming role in modern American literature.

“This Land Is Your Land”: A Note on America as a Nation of “Varied Carols”

Modern American literature starts with the sound of voices singing: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”. It is Walt Whitman who begins one of his most popular poems with this line, referring to the voices of people from all generations, classes and ethnic backgrounds who are about to form a new type of nation, a nation beyond ethnicity based on the principles of democracy and diversity alone. Against this background of listening to the countless different voices, his equally famous poem ‘America’ reads like a personal and individual answer: “Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, / All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old, / Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich”. Whitman’s poetry lays out the foundation for a specifically American tradition of song poetry that focuses on political equality and social justice as collective human rights and the free development of every person’s individuality at the same time. The present article follow the line from Whitman’s poetry of songs to 20th century American song poetry, by the way of the example of Woody Guthrie’s anthem ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and its transformative receptions in Bob Dylan’s and Bruce Springsteen’s adaptations (in contrast to the way in which European national anthems conceive the nation-as-territory).

THE LITERARY STYLE OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The article studies the distinctive features of literary style of Ernest Hemingway and analyzes a significant impact of the writer’s eventful life on his writing style. Some peculiarities of his fiction are discussed on the base of the writer’s most outstanding short stories and novels in the paper as well. Ernest Hemingway’s invention in the modern American literature “the iceberg theory” is discussed including some thoughts of the literary critic Jackson Benson.

Reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple Through The Lens Of Eco-Feminism

Alice Walker, a female author, had a significant impact on modern American literature. The Color Purple, the pinnacle of her literaryaccomplishments, has garnered her three accolades since its release and is recognized as a significant work of black literature. The interaction between humans, specifically women, and nature can be summarised in three stages: fragmentation, over-sewing, and completeness. By depicting how black women and the environment are fragmented as a result of oppression, Walker aims to increase black women's selfconsciousness. She searches for strategies to help the wounded souls see the fullness of survival. Walker expresses her ecofeminist consciousness to create a happy society where men and women, as well as the human race as a whole, may coexist happily by urging people to give emphasis to issues relating to women and the environment. The methodology entails discussions of how women and nature are depicted in "The Color Purple," and how masculine supremacy exploits nature while oppressing women, making both captives of the market. This essay argues that Alice Walker incorporates a theme of feminine and natural freedom from oppression and violence throughout her book. This is done via the lens of ecofeminism. Symbiosis, in which there is no exploitation of the environment or of men, is predicted by Alice Walker.

Distopia Centrului. Transnaționalizarea Modernismului Hispano-American

Abstract This paper explores Hispanic American literary modernism in light of the theoretical studies of World Literature. Regarding the periphery-center relationship, prevails the idea that there is a hierarchy that positions cultures and, implicitly, literature, near the European center. The focus is on Latin American modernism because it shows that there is a dystopia of the periphery-center relationship. After all, modernism is, in fact, creation and, at the same time, an obsession with the peripheries, born of the time lag from the center. Therefore, the study will analyze the role of cultural exchanges and the division of cultural capital and it will consider the transnationalization of Latin American literature as a starting point for literary modernism.

The Metaphors “Human-Animal”, “Animal-Human” in T. Morrison’s Novel “Beloved”

Introduction. The study investigates the role of the metaphors “human-animal”, “animalhuman” based on the novel “Beloved” by T. Morrison. The relevance of the research lies in the lack of knowledge of the linguistic specifics of this landmark novel for modern American literature, in the absence of research to identify and analyze key metaphors reflecting the author's conceptualization of reality.Methodology and sources. The authors of this article, relying on semantic and cognitive approaches, consider metaphor as a combination of two planes: linguistic and mental. To describe the mechanism of metaphorical transfers, the article uses the proposed by J. Lakoff and M. Johnson, terms characterizing the interaction of two knowledge structures: the source sphere and the target sphere.Results and discussion. The study showed that the metaphor “man-animal” becomes one of the most productive in the novel. This metaphorical structure includes the following elements of the source sphere: animal names; animal properties; animal body parts; objects characterizing animal activities; actions carried out in relation to animals and animals themselves; people performing actions in relation to animals. The relevance of this metaphor and the variety of sources of transference is dictated by the theme of the novel, comprehending one of the most acute problems of American history – the theme of slavery. The disenfranchised position of a human slave, his “animal” dependence on the slave owner forms the conceptual basis of most metaphorical transfers within this lexical and semantic field. The metaphor “animal-human” is used less often and serves, first of all to enhance the contrast between the life of a human slave and an animal who sometimes feels more confident and freer. This metaphorical structure includes the following elements of the source sphere: forms of addressing a person, the names of the characters in the book, the title of a person, human actions, human properties, objects associated with a person.Conclusion. In the novel “Beloved” by T. Morrison, the metaphor is a significant element of the textual structure reflecting the author's linguistic picture of the world. Especially productive are the mutual likenesses of man and animal, figuratively interpreting the life and attitude of a human slave who is regularly subjected to physical and moral violence.

Teaching The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Wilder’s Other Novels

Abstract This article attempts to persuade readers who are teachers to consider teaching The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Wilder’s other novels. Some may fear the style, structure, and historical setting of The Bridge would be off-putting for twenty-first-century students, but in the author’s own experience, students find Wilder’s philosophical narration thought-provoking and moving, similar to how audiences respond to Wilder’s most famous play, Our Town. The Bridge and other Wilder novels can be taught in courses on Modern American Literature, The Novel, Introduction to Literature, Religion and Literature, Philosophy and Literature, World Literature, and, of course, a seminar on Wilder. Student response to the author’s Wilder course has always been enthusiastic. When teaching The Bridge, the author focuses on three topics: Providence versus randomness in the fall of the bridge, unrequited love, and the view of time or history. The author describes how he has students explore the Providence versus randomness issue in a group discussion, applying four different criteria within the novel itself to major and minor characters. In the next section of his article, the author summarizes Wilder’s other six novels and suggest the kinds of courses for which they might be useful.

AN ARCHETYPAL APPROACH TOWARDS THE GREAT GATSBY: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL AMERICAN DREAM THROUGH META-MEME IN THE GREAT GATSBY

The American dream is one of the most studied subjects, especially in modern American literature. Remarkably when it comes to modern American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby cannot be omitted from these studies. It is true that there are many articles and debates on The Great Gatsby, and there will be more. Nevertheless, what makes this study somewhat diverse is that Gatsby’s American dream can be reckoned as a meta-meme inspired by the ancient Greek heroes in a post-postmodernist way. The article will particularly try to show that Gatsby is a timeless hero whose one foot in the past and the other in the future. Some may find Gatsby under the name of Hercules, some under the name Odysseus, and some under the name Bruce Wayne. Gatsby cannot be limited within a limited period since the connotations that his existence stand for create an everlasting effect on any human society. That is to say, the meta-meme, which Gatsby ‘radiates’ or reflects is the thing what humankind have craved for since they existed: Power. Some may call it the American dream or the multimillionaire’s dream; some may call it a solipsist’s dream. This dream, however, one way or another, is a dream that Morpheus, the Dream God, will continue to bring to us. Although it can sometimes be a nightmare, the silhouette of the dream will always remain the same. Therefore, through a comparative study of history, literary theory, mythology and literature, this article intends to show that the American Dream persists even stronger through meta-memes at the dawn of twenty-first century.

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life Craig Howes (bio) Others contributors to this collection will movingly and accurately capture what Miriam was like as a coeditor, coauthor, crew member, and dear friend. Except for the paddling, I knew her in all of these roles, but I will begin this Biography tribute with some words about her as a researcher and scholar. Her biography on the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa English Department website listed her principal interests as modernism and modern American literature, twentieth century women’s literature, autobiography theory and criticism, and “all modes of life writing.” Her academic journey explains how her interests became her recognized expertise. She received her BA in 1970 from SUNY Buffalo, a major center for the study of modern and contemporary literature. The title of her 1979 NYU doctoral dissertation was “‘Persistent Pattern and Significant Form’: The Conceptual and Formal Impact of The Waste Land on Selected Anti-Realistic American Novels,” and she would go on to publish essays on T. S. Eliot, William Gaddis, Nathanael West, and Hart Crane. What she soon became best known for, however, was her work on women and modernism. She published extensively on Djuna Barnes and H.D. She edited and included her own work in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays. And in 1989 she coedited with Ellen G. Friedman the collection Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Their introduction has been called “practically a monograph” in itself, and the volume played an important role in “the continuing feminist project of the recovery and foregrounding of women writers.” This landmark collection was reprinted in 2014 by Princeton University Press as part of its Legacy Library series. In the mid-1980s, Miriam’s interest in modernism brought her to Hawaiʻi for a seminar conducted by the noted William Butler Yeats and Hart Crane scholar John Unterecker. Shortly afterwards, she resigned her associate professorship at Elizabeth Seton College and settled permanently here. For Miriam, moving to a world center for modernism studies like Honolulu after years of toiling in the literary and cultural backwater of New York City was an easy decision to make—after all, Jack Unterecker and Leon Edel had already done the same thing. But I suspect that someone named Alan Holzman probably had something to do with it as well. She [End Page 135] spent her first years as a visiting assistant professor in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa—she always remembered who was collegial, and who was . . . otherwise. She came on the tenure track in 1989, in 1993 she was tenured and promoted early, and she became a full professor in 2003. As a lifewriting scholar, Miriam’s status is indisputable. Part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s renowned Studies in Autobiography series, her 2004 book, The Text Is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe, fulfilled Susanna Egan’s prophetic assessment: “Miriam Fuchs is breaking new ground. Her remarkable exploration of catastrophe writing will be important in autobiography studies and fascinating to all who care about self-representation as a mode of survival.” This book brought Miriam’s many interests together—modernism, women’s literature, autobiographical fiction, art, and Hawaiʻi and the Pacific—in her outstanding opening chapter on the diaries of Queen Liliʻuokalani, but also in the book’s dedication: “To the women paddlers—Lanikai, Kumulau, Bora Bora.” I’ll let other contributors to this tribute address the autobiographical dimensions of a book entitled The Text Is Myself, mentioning only its major theme: “however much the past may be shaped into a discernable storyline, it is the uncertain present that preoccupies these writers.” And of course, Miriam had a long and profoundly influential impact upon Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and the Center for Biographical Research. Cynthia G. Franklin offers some personal and detailed remarks on their collaborations as coeditors and friends; let me set the stage with an origin story, and a few personal notes. When I took over as editor of Biography in 1994, I asked Miriam to replace me as one of the literary editors; a year later, she was listed as “literary editor in chief...

A Study on Symbolic Connotations and Metaphorical Implications in <i>The Color Purple</i>

The Color Purple written by Alice Walker is a powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature to indicate a large number of symbolic images with profound meanings. The paper analyzes the rich meanings contained in the symbolic images and metaphors, and strives to comprehensively interpret and deeply understand the themes and ideological connotations of the novel. An interpretation of the symbolic images indicates that: 1) The symbolic images embodied in the novel reflect Alice Walker’s “overall survival” of her womanism, through which Walker points out the way for black women to realize “overall survival”, through black women’s search for independence in family and society; 2) Alice Walker entitled the novel The Color Purple, which reflects her desire to build a harmonious world. The color pink stands for females while blue stands for males; the color purple, a mixture of pink and blue, symbolizes the unity of black men and women to denote that the harmonious coexistence is expected to be the only way for the black to resist racism and obtain happiness in a multi-cultural society.

Lost Ladies: (Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work

Lost Ladies:(Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work Anna Creadick Peacocks are inspiring . . . but they sure don't stop to consider they might be standing in your way. —Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983, p. 59) For so long, and justifiably, the project of Legacy in general and the Profiles feature in particular has been a commitment to bringing women writers in. As we teach and write about women writers today, are there some who ought to be left out? Are there some women writers who, like Flannery O'Connor, to whom Walker is referring in the epigraph above, might even be "standing in [the] way"? In this essay I take up the case of Willa Cather in service of what might seem a counterintuitive question: Could the sidelining of some women writers ever be part of feminist recovery work? Where and why must we include or exclude a writer like Cather? And why, or at what cost, has she received what could be seen as an excess of scholarly attention? leaving cather out I recently decided to resuscitate an American women writers course long on the books at the small liberal arts college where I teach. After some agonizing about the book list, I decided to leave Cather out. That difficult choice led me to this essay.1 Cather's centrality to the American literary canon is as unquestionable as her critical status is formidable. Over twenty years ago, Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin charted a "climactic phase" of Cather scholarship, noting with satisfaction that "[a]t last count there were 860 online citations for [Cather] in the [End Page 102] MLA bibliography" (206). In the two decades since, that number has nearly tripled. The MLA International Bibliography currently lists more scholarship on Cather than on Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin, more than on Alice Walker or Zora Neale Hurston, more than on Tillie Olsen or Flannery O'Connor. Today, Cather trails only Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison as the most-studied American woman author.2 One explanation for the endless fascination with Cather as a subject comes from Deborah Carlin, who notes, "Whether viewed as an American icon, a woman writer, a lesbian, a cosmopolitan Midwesterner, a conservative Republican, a scathing journalist, an antimodernist, or an embittered elegiast, Cather remains an anomaly in American literature and her fiction is peculiarly hard to place" (6).3 These same qualities that make Cather so hard for scholars to "place" also make her so easy to place in the classroom. I could, and do, teach Cather in my Modern American Literature class and in my Sexuality and American Literature class. But in my American Women Writers course, I balked. Why? To manage the enormity of the course subject, I chose an organizing theme: "Feminist Recovery Work." We would read the women writers we might never have read at all if not for the labor of feminist critics who rescued those writers from obscurity, or at least from the margins. So I assigned Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. We read Gloria Anzaldúa, Mitsuye Yamada, and Grace Metalious. The course opened with Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative and closed with Janet Mock's 2014 memoir of trans womanhood, which enacts a different kind of recovery work while also regularly name-checking many authors already on the syllabus. But I kept Cather out. That decision had to do with three forces often at play in American women's writing: misogyny, canonicity, and feminism. misogynist (mis)readings Flashback, 2005: I was a new visiting assistant professor, teaching an American literature survey, when one especially enthusiastic student asked if he could come to office hours "just to talk more about the reading." I remember so clearly how he knocked on the doorjamb, stepped in, sat down in the late autumn light, looked up at me, and said, "I usually hate female writers—but I really love this book." After working to control my shock, I smiled weakly, took a breath, and in my mind began to compose a Cather paper. The book? Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady. A Lost Lady offers excellent terrain for...

Travel and Imperialist Nostalgia in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa

This paper examines the politics of travel and imperialist nostalgia in Ernest Hemingway’s memoir Green Hills of Africa. Informed by recent theoretical contributions to travel and postcolonial studies, this paper investigates ways in which the representation of travel and nostalgia in this memoir speaks to the colonial and imperialist rhetoric. Unlike previous studies, this paper suggests that the travels and nostalgia of Hemingway for Green Hills of Africa reflect certain ideological and historical determinants of the interwar politics that dominated modern American literature. While Hemingway seems to distance himself from the rhetoric of the empire, his reflections on travelling in Africa and his nostalgia for it are arguably entangled by it. This paper demonstrates that Hemingway’s narrative extends a dichotomy between the East and West constructed by 19th century (American) orientalist travel writers and critiqued by Edward Said..

The notion of philosophical tendencies and philosophical fiction in contemporary american literature

At the conference with representatives of the country's creative intelligentsia on August 3, 2017, the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev made a presentation, where he highlighted important facts: “In our country, along with all spheres and industries, great attention is paid to the development of culture, art, literature and the media”. Nowadays, it is necessary to know the literature of the world, thus to broaden the horizon of humanity. The object of research is to identify specific features of the unique genre of philosophical prose on the basis of famous Modern American novels and to explain the notion “philosophical tendency”. Philosophical prose is also a holistic exploration of the world; but the prism through which the artist looks at the world is not a fact, not a phenomenon of literature or arts, but the dynamics of social consciousness, recreated in its individual contradictory forms. Throughout the research work the author displays the major tasks: (1) to study the literary development of American philosophically oriented literature; (2) to study the major concepts of philosophical prose; (3) to reveal the notion philosophical tendencies illustrated in the prominent works of contemporary American writers. The investigation was carried out basing on descriptive and analytical methods, formalistic conceptual and empirical method. According to research findings, the author discloses the idea that Contemporary American literature with philosophical tendencies is a genre under the domination of the society, progress and technology. In addition, the research also categorizes the essential topics and concepts of philosophical novels and defines their distinctive features. The results and conclusions of the research make a sufficient contribution to the development of “Theory of Modern American Literature ”. It allows to be acquainted with variety of definitions and major concepts of contemporary philosophical genre in Literature suggested by different scholars and literary critics. The results of the research can be applicable for writing scientific articles, qualification papers and course works. Partially, the results are expected to be used for the lectures and seminars on the philosophical tendencies of contemporary American literature.

“Toxic” American literature

The subject of this research is the behavior model of the characters in modern American literature. The goal lies in examination of the key attributes of “toxicity” as an element of artistic world resembled in modern American literature. The object of this research is the prose of Chuck Palahniuk. It is established that “toxicity” is one of the plotline components for building the characters of the heroes in modern American literature. The conducted analysis of the images of heroes and the components of artistic world of C. Palahniuk’s prose allows concluding that “toxicity” is not only the binding element in the artistic world of American literature, but also a construct that forms the dynamic development of the heroes. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that this article is first to analyze “toxicity” as an artistic element of modern American literary texts. Prior to that, “toxicity” as a phenomenon was viewed from the perspective of psychological, sociological, and philosophical research. Therefore, the study of the phenomenon of toxicity in literature is of particular relevance due to its interdisciplinarity. The author believes that the types ad peculiarities of “toxicity” as an element of the artistic world in modern American literature, as well as interaction of other structural elements should be also viewed on the example of other works of modern American literature. The characteristic features that unite the works as a transgressive prose should be determined and compared.

Diagnosing Desire: Mental Health and Modern American Literature, 1890–1955

Abstract This second book project argues that psychological diagnosis drives literary and scientific innovation in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US. I demonstrate how experimental modernism and biomedical development both deploy and resist evolving classifications of mental life. These underappreciated cultural dialogues generate authoritative models of cognitive and corporeal health determined by race and gender. I take up four such medicalized types and establish how these pathologized figures embody anxieties about social change, particularly related to race, gender, and sexuality. Synthesizing literary fiction with transatlantic medical discourse and computational methods with traditional archival practices, this project rethinks the cultural politics at work in biological schemas of wellness and disorder, while highlighting the stumbling blocks of interpretive practices shared by the sciences and the arts.