Postmodern Writers Research Articles

Trans(inter?)textual Migrations (Relations?) in the Traditional (Postmodernist?) Narrative of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's narrative style reflects a blend of traditional oral storytelling and postmodern literary techniques. This duality makes it challenging to categorize him strictly as either a traditional or postmodernist writer. His works, such as Midnight’s Children, exhibit fragmented storytelling akin to oral narratives, where the narrator frequently digresses, influenced by their environment and memories. These digressions create intertextual relationships, not just between texts but also between the text and the non-textual world, a technique which is called the "grasshopper narrative” in this paper. Rushdie's Midnight’s Children is heavily influenced by both Eastern oral traditions and Western literary techniques. The narrative is interspersed with references and borrowings from other texts and traditions, creating a tapestry of intertextual and trans-textual relations. For instance, characters and motifs from Forster’s A Passage to India and Kipling’s Kim find their way into Rushdie’s narrative, creating a dialogue between these works and Rushdie’s own. Moreover, the novel’s fragmented structure and the presence of a listener, Padma, enhance its oral storytelling feel, reinforcing its connection to traditional Eastern narratives. The influence of Western authors like Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez is also evident. These influences blend with Rushdie’s use of magic realism and his unique narrative style. Furthermore, Rushdie’s cinematic influences and his use of film vocabulary add another layer to his complex narrative structure. Rushdie’s narrative technique is a hybrid of traditional oral storytelling and postmodernist intertextuality, creating rich, multi-layered texts that traverse cultural and textual boundaries.

POSTMODERNIST VIEWS OF TIME AND SPACE IN LITERATURE

Rejecting canonical narrative forms and ideas, postmodern literature presents a fresh perspective on the passage of time and geographical location. In contrast to the linear and cohesive representations of time and space expected in modernist literature, postmodernist works often embrace dislocation, fragmentation, and distorted timelines. Through metafiction, intertextuality, and non-linear tales, this study investigates how postmodern writers question traditional ideas of space and time. These methods show time as cyclical, irrelevant, or fluid, which disrupts the reader's perception of a steady, chronological development. Similarly, postmodern literature frequently portrays space as hyperreal, fragmented, or disjointed, reflecting a world where the lines between the tangible and the abstract are increasingly blurred. This study analyses seminal postmodern works to see how these changed views of space and time fit into a more extensive critique of postmodern reality, identity, and meaning stability. According to the results, postmodern literature does more than make us rethink the passage of time; it also prompts us to wonder what it means to exist.

Linguistics of intertext. Quotations in Julio Cortázar’s fiction (based on the material of the Spanish language)

In modern humanities the range of issues, related to manifestations of intertextuality in texts of different language systems, their interpretation by the recipient, as well as the use of intertexts by authors of verbal and non-verbal texts, is still of great interest to researchers. Moreover, the intertext plays a significant role in modern text-creating. This makes important studying the structural characteristics of intertextual units with the aim of developing the technic of creation one’s own intertexts as well as translating intertexts of others. So, the object of the present research are the intertextual units in the postmodernist writings, the subject are their linguistic characteristics. As the material the author has chosen the fiction by Julio Cortázar, which is particularly reach in intertexts. In order to delineate the existing definitions of intertextuality according to the “broad” and “restricted” approaches and precise our own vision of this phenomenon the author applied the methods of the cognitive sciences and semiotics. The general linguistic methods, such as description and observation, have been used in the analysis of the structure of the chosen intertextual units. The scientific originality of the research consists in the description of the linguistic particularities of different types of quotes in Cortázar’s fiction. During the analysis, quotations based on literal reproduction of the original format of the intertextually borrowed saying and citations that change it have been defined. The author pays particular attention to the analysis of the attribution, considered the key structural component of an intertextual unit. The results of the research may form the basis of the further researches of the linguistics of intertext. It may also be of practical interest to the authors using intertextual units in their own texts, as well as to translators of Cortázar’s and other postmodernist writers’ fiction.

Linguistic bases of the intertextuality theory

As the object of the research the author chooses the linguistic characteristics of the intertextual unit as the main form of realization in texts of the stylistic device based on borrowing textual elements from other texts. Despite a significant development of the intertextuality theory, the analysis of the theoretical framework in the field of intertextual interaction reveals a lack of knowledge of the linguistic aspects of functioning of intertexts both at the level of expression and meaning. In the article the author analyzes the basic structural particularities of the intertextual unit in postmodernist fiction. This kind of textual material was chosen because of high content of intertexts in this discoursive system, the fact conditioned by the interest of postmodernist writers to the capacities of the stylistic device described in the article. To delineate the content of the notion “intertextuality” according to the “broad” and “restricted” approaches, the author applies cognitive methods and carries out an experiment based on semiotic methods whose the aim was to describe the mechanisms of decrypting intertexts in non-verbal texts. Having analyzed the content of the term “intertextuality” according to the “broad” and “restricted” approaches from the cognitive and semiotic points of view, the author suggests differentiating two distinct phenomena. One of them, the stylistic device based on inclusion of different elements of other texts into a proper text, is under-researched from the linguistic point of view. The article presents main theoretical conclusions about the correlation between the plane of expression of intertexts and their source-texts, as well as the types and the role of the attribution as a key intertextual element. The conclusions may be used in intertext-making activity, e.g. in translation. They may also serve as the basis for further researches in this field.

The Postmodern Condition of Fragmentation in Githa Hariharan’s “Fugitive Histories”

Post -1980 is the period of postmodernism in Indian English Literature with the postmodern novelists featuring Indian tradition and history in a new light using new narrative strategies. Githa Hariharan as a postmodern writer has used the technique of rewriting myths and histories to liberate women. Lisa Tuttle defines feminist theory as asking “new questions of old texts”. Old texts are revisited to challenge the gender stereotypes embedded in myths that have fashioned this patriarchal society. Githa Hariharan, in her novel “Fugitive Histories” recalls the Gujarat riots that have left an indelible mark in the lives of the affected people who look out to some form of rehabilitation to keep going in this uncertain world. The female characters she depicts, are strong enough to combat the present situation though they face all kinds of suppression and the sense of resignation with which they bring peace into their life really takes Githa Hariharan to another level. She has tried her best to celebrate life amidst chaos that exists in modern society for she understands that there is no use lamenting over the loss of the past or the collapse of selfhood as Tim Woods rightly points out in his book “Beginning Postmodernism”. This paper analyses the postmodern condition of fragmentation in the novel “Fugitive Histories” and shows how women try to reconstruct their lives in the midst of the disparity that prevails in society based on religion and gender.

TRANSGRESSIVE LANGUAGE OF POSTMODERNIST AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: INTERTEXT AND METALEPSIS

Background. Intertext and metalepsis in the proposed study are considered as the phenomena of transgressive poetics, means of creating the ontological dimension of an artistic text and tools for textualization of life. Transgressive language contributes to the correction of preconceived notions about postmodernism, facilitate the disclosure of changing nature of autobiography by revealing and analyzing internal contradictions − the amphibology of meaning. Self-generated paradoxes are revealed in the pluralized text due to metalepsis that registered dissolving borders between the levels of narration − author (reality), narrator (extra-diegetic), narratee (intra-diegetic) and intertextuality that creates an ambivalent space for co-existing multilayered experiences . The pronouns «I», «he», «they», constantly alternating, refer to each other, preventing the re-creation of an unambiguous original signified, i.e. a real biographical author who created an autobiographical text − the basis of the genre of autobiography. 
 The purpose of the article is to analyze the role of intertext and metalepsis in creating an autobiographically transgressive text on the example of a novel by the postmodernist writer Stephen Dixon.
 Methods. The poststructuralist approach in the context of literary theory along with elements of intertextual, narrative, stylistic analysis was used. 
 Results. The study of the peculiarities of transgressive language in the autobiographical postmodernist writing shows that Dixon's I-texts are sustained in the parameters of a classic novel: there is neither hypertextuality nor open polemical intertextuality. However, the transformation of the artistic matter of literature and the nature of autobiography is multifaceted and noted at all levels of the text. 
 Discussion. Dixon’s innovations lie in the further transformation of the modus of the author's presence, begun by Modernists. The artistic strategy of transgression of the experience of classical autobiography, applied by Dixon, is embodied in using the reconceptualized stylistic devices. One of them is ontological metalepsis that reveals transgressive dynamics on all levels of artistic conventions and, above all, the boundaries of fiction and reality in the act of creativity. The representative texts of the American writer reveal the growing sense of the thinning line between language and reality in the autobiographical prose of recent decades. This is accompanied by the development of innovative breakthroughs to reflect one's life experience, dictated by the existential need to restore ties with the material, which runs into the ambivalence of language structures.

Реализация концепта «память» и вопрос о достоверности памяти в романе Д. Накипова «Круг пепла»

This article is devoted to the analysis of the concept “memory”, which is relevant for the postmodern understanding of the world and the problem of its reliability in D. Nakipov’s novel “Circle of Ashes”. Memory is an important concept for the writer, who is both a trans-linguistic writer and a postmodern writer. The analysis of researchers' opinions concerning the importance of the concept “memory” for the work of bilingual authors, as well as the essential understanding of memory as a phenomenon within the framework of the postmodern understanding of the concept has been carried out. The relationship between the presence and absence of historical knowledge, which is important for reflecting the author’s picture of the world, is revealed, and the question of the importance of immanent history, the creation of macrohistory from microhistory as the only tool that can preserve authenticity, is raised. A detailed analysis of the artistic use of the concept of memory and the reflection of its essence in the novel of a Kazakhstani writer has been made. It is concluded that D. Nakipov values factual historical knowledge, but places immanent history, which includes the emotional experience of the observer-participant, above factual history.

Equality, Friendship and Harmony Interpretation of Postmodern Ethical Thought in Lessing’s on Cats

British post-modernist writer Doris Lessing paid close attention to the changes in the moral order of society in the 20th century, answering the value and meaning of the proposition of “ethics” in the formation of the times in her works, and constantly reflecting on the ethical relationship between human beings and various subjects in society. This idea is fully reflected in her novel On Cats. On Cats adopts a first-person narrative style, and through a series of storylines such as “I” witnessing “my” family dealing with a flood of sick cats, de-sexing cats, and rescuing and caring for sick cats, it vividly shows the daily life of people and cats and the realistic picture of the life in that times. In addition, through “my” mother’s repression and resistance, the miserable life of working people, and urban air pollution, On Cats also reproduces the “new problems” in the development of the relationship between human beings, human and non-human creatures, and human and nature in a comprehensive manner. Therefore, from the perspective of postmodern ethics, this paper interprets the ethical relationship between humans, animals and nature as expressed in On Cats, thus criticizing a series of modern qualities such as masculocentrism, upper class centrism and anthropocentrism. In addition, this paper aims to break the dichotomy between the subject and the other, and to build a “community” in which husband and wife respect each other, people are friendly and supportive of each other, and people live in harmony with nature. This paper also has implications for the harmonious and stable development of modern society today.

Elements of postmodernism in One Hundred Years of Solitude by G.G.Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is considered as one of the greatest postmodern writers who has inspired innumerable authors throughout the world. His peculiar utilization of postmodern elements has been subject of investigation in the study with critical emphasis on: fragmentation, lack of identity and juxtaposition of two disparate cultures. Theories for the present study is a combination of Nunberg (1990) and Briscoe (1995). Employing descriptive analytical method, three aforementioned elements dabbled in previous are discussed and arrayed by explanation and instances from the text. The results reveals that particular use of such elements in the text with its extraordinary intercommunication with other postmodern elements play a significant role on worldwide éclat of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Marked Feat of Allusions in Roman Mikhailov’s Fairy Tales Collection «The Berries»

Artistic experiments are characteristic of the latest Russian literature. The experiment allows not only to create the effect of a dialogue with the classics, but also to build a new model for assessing reality. The poetic world traditionally has two highways of balance: this is time and an artistic space. The poetics of postmodernism is focused on the creation of the new within the framework of the transformation of the existing. Aesthetic experience processed by postmodern authors has signs of allusions, reminiscences, quotations, open hints. Roman Mikhailov's prose is a unique example of playing with literary codes, cultural and historical stereotypes. This happens both at the level of form and at the boundary level of content. The new literary reality of assessing the present in the mode of fairy-tale narrative is being implemented in R. Mikhailovs collection The Berries (2019). Lately reseachers have been finding little interest in the collection, there are hadly any works found in the public domain that would concern the analysis of language, style, author's manner of narration, compositional framework, genre variations. Thus, the study in line with the assessment of the typology and poetics of Roman Mikhailov's fairy tales appears to be relevant. The methodological content of this work correlates with the one of a receptive and hermeneutic nature. Labeling of allusions in the collection The Berries is carried out for the purpose of visual differentiation of meanings. The scope of postmodern writers meanings expands to rhizome. Consequently, the text stops being only a formal plane, but becomes a paradigmatic sign system. The collection of fairy tales The Berries contains texts of different years. However, they form a single artistic world with related plots. The literary experiment of R. Mikhailov's fairy tales focuses on the texts by Sh. Perrault, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.A. Nekrasov, I.S. Turgenev, N.S. Leskov, A.P. Chekhov; N. Pogodin's screenplay; V. Suteev's cartoon plots; V.S. Vysotsky's song structure. The range of allusions in this case is wide, while the integrity of the cycle remains impeccable. This material can be used in studies on the poetics of the latest Russian prose, as well as in the invastigations focused on Roman Mikhailovs works.

Features of the narrative structure of the novel of the postmodern era on the example of Barry Unsworth's novel "Moralite"

The author examines the features of the narrative structure of the novel of English postmodernism "Morality Play" (Unsworth "Morality Play"). The purpose of this article is to identify the features of the construction of the novel of postmodernism. Postmodern writers tend to transform genres of high literature, making them accessible to mass reading. Moralite is a special kind of dramatic performance in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. A detective novel is a phenomenon of mass literature. The detective genre is based on three main elements that form the plot: crime, investigation and solution. In the article, these three elements are considered on the example of the novel "Moralite". Despite the fact that the plot-forming element is a detective component, the author does not fulfill all the genre strategies of the detective. In the presented work, the detective influence of the construction of a postmodern novel will be considered, in which readers are involved in the active process of reconstructing the incident, and the main character finds a solution to all the mysteries and riddles. The relevance of the work is due to the lack of full–fledged Russian-language research on the designated topic - dissertations, collections of articles, monographs. In the novel moralita, the identity of the murderer is not important, the victims are not important. The author is interested in the effect produced by the "performance" played out on the stage. Barry Unsworth demonstrates his vision of creating a new Medieval genre, he shows how this transition to everyday themes took place. One person can change the usual way of life by taking a risk and leading. Wandering comedians, who are the main characters, appear to readers as naive amateur detectives. They are passionate about the process and improve their "Thomas Wells Game", but not for the sake of punishing and exposing the killer. In the process of research, it can be concluded that two main genre layers can be distinguished in the novel – detective and historical. In addition to these genres of features, it can be argued that this is a novel about the genre.

Modern Postmodernity and Discursive Power: Part II


 
 
 The discussion follows the logic of Western modern metaphysics (mathematical) and ontology (atomistic materialism) in order to demonstrate how scientific discourses assumed a power to construct the environment. A discourse of any discipline is constructed on the basis of its value to be applied on the material, homogeneous environment, to yield desired technical products, including genetic, chemical, electronic, physiological, etc. Thus, each discourse contains the ‘power’ to remake the environment in accordance with its rules. The result is the following: environment is a discursive construct. Such constructivism is accepted by post-modern writers who claim that all discourses are a power which determines how we understand and treat the environment.
 
 

Narcissistic Pastiche: Towards Exploring the Concept of “Cras es noster” Through Nostalgic Postmodernism in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars

This paper attempts to explore the concept of “cras es noster” through revealing John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars as a postmodern narcissistic pastiche. The study demonstrates how Green deviates postmodern literary traditions to offer viable solutions to contemporary writing impasses. Therefore, it examines the characters as embodiments of postmodern writers facing writing obstacles, especially the lack of avant-garde techniques which could be employed in fictional writings to revive the dwindling spirit of narrative potential needed to enhance the future of fiction as a whole. The study offers an in-depth analysis of the novel as a postmodern pastiche of Renaissance’s canonical penchant fascination with literary innovation. In this regard, it polarizes the Latin concept “cras es noster” within a postmodern context for the sake of departing into ingenious writing forms. These forms unconventionally reflect the authorial nostalgic hope to reinforce the sense of creativity in postmodern literature inspired by the past grand works, especially the Shakespearean grand style. The authorial propensity for establishing such aesthetic form is accomplished by narcissistic narrative perspective, which implicitly refers to the presence of the authorial voice in the plot. The study’s methodology is a qualitative textual-contextual interpretation of the selected novel’s postmodern themes and techniques. Thus, there are two main findings of the study. First, it explores Green’s The Fault in Our Stars as a postmodern pastiche of Shakespeare’s grand style. Second, it unravels the concept of “cras es noster” as being present in the novel via its narcissistic emphasis on writing great works to reinforce the future of fictional writings.

Myth and Religion in Goran Petrović’s Novel “The Siege of the Church of the Holy Savior”

The article reveals the interrelationship between myth and religion, fantastics and reality in Goran Petrović’s novel “The Siege of the Church of the Holy Savior”. The provisions on the belonging of thenovel to postmodernism, on the parallels of the “Siege of the Church of the Holy Savior” with the work of the famous Serbian postmodernist writer Milorad Pavić are considered. The presence of elements of postmodernist poetics in Petrović is noted, the possibilities of combination postmodernism and myth, postmodernism and Christianity are explored.

Giving a Voice to the Oppressed in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Toni Morrison’s Beloved

The current study intends to show the link between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The study tries to explore the way Lucky, who is introduced as a slave in Beckett’s play, represents Morrison’s Sethe. The study also intends to show how both Becket and Morrison are advocates for the oppressed and give them voices to speak up for themselves. To reach the aims of the study, both literary works are approached from the lens of postmodernism, especially focusing on postwar issues and how postmodern writers began looking back to colonial literature and started giving voices to the oppressed, where the approach of postcolonialism occurs. Most of the conducted studies tackle each literary work alone from the postmodern lens. What makes the current study different is how it links the two literary works together, yet also highlights how each author gives a voice to the oppressed.

Tradition as an Interpretation

Postmodernism considers a literary text to be created not by imitating and reflecting reality, but as a rereading and recreating of an already existing text. As a result, in the analysis of a postmodern text it is essential to take into consideration the context, i.e., those texts which are used as a hypertext by various methods, whether it is citation, parody or allusion. It should be also noted that for the majority of postmodern writers’ intertextuality is a conscious aesthetic method that enables to construct the text with a bold experimentation and artistic play. Contemporary British poet Richard Burns (Berengarten) is one of those authors in whose poems postmodern variations of other famous writers’ texts create a highly allusive work. His most famous work The Manager written in the 90ies of the 20th century is an answer of the post-modern poet to the works of the great authors of the high modernism T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Richard Burns has remarked in his numerous interviews and essays that he views history as an unfinished sentence, where every work created is in constant dynamic dialogue with the works created chronologically before or after it. Such an understanding of tradition which resonates with that of T.S. Eliot is well-apparent in his poetry as well as in his essays. Hence, his ‘Big Narrative’ is in a dialogue with the two seminal texts of high modernism: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and Cantos by Ezra Pound. Burns himself remarked that the poem is his ‘conscious attempt “to answer”’ his great predecessor Eliot. (Burns: 2002). Recycling the experience of high modernism and using it as an intertext is apparent not only on the conceptual level, but in the form of the poem. Fragmentary, chaotic text with no linear narrative, abundance of literary allusions and reminiscences – all these characteristics of high modernism, which made it differ from a traditional narrative poem, are apparent in The Manager. Like his great modernist predecessors, postmodernist poet Richard Burns uses the technique of fragmentation and disjointed timeline as a means to express existential alienation and dissociated consciousness of his hero who lives in the second half of the 20th century. Thus, fragmentation does not mean absence of form, bus a new kind of form, as after Eliot’s and Pound’s works it acquired a certain significance as a formal technique. Consequently, it is not unexpected that the question about the significance of the form is one of the many themes of The Manager. Self-reflexivity, characteristic to the post-modern aesthetics, questions the relationship between “reality” and art and attempts to comment and explain itself, i.e., the text of the poem by metafictional auto-references. Allusions to the texts by Eliot and Pound (as well as using Pound as one of the voices/characters in the poem) work together to create the text that reflects upon its own process of artful composition. Richard Burns is well-aware that modernist quest, or as he puts it ‘building new bridges’ urged its representatives to reject conventional forms. At the same time the innovations introduced by them became to some extent a cliché and a tradition which needs to be valuated and answered. The poem The Manager is an ironic reply to the poetics and worldview of High Modernism, haunted by the ghosts of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. By citation, allusion, parody of the modernists’ canonic texts the author creates a post-modern hyper-text. As Richard Burns himself remarked: ‘If The Waste Land and Cantos are the paradigm of modernism, than The Manager is its criticism.’ (Burns 2002). Although, the poem is not only a criticism, as it is apparent from the analysis, the author is well-aware of the novelty that modernism brought about and without which neither his poem nor post-modernism would exist.

Exploring the Postmodern Apocalyptic Narrative: A Jamesonian Reading of Etel Adnan’s Master of the Eclipse

The tale of the apocalypse is considered a current subject of debate that has captivated the attention of postmodern writers. Similarly, in a postmodern atmosphere, Etel Adnan’s masterpiece, Master of the Eclipse (2009), problematises the traditional apocalyptic narrative. Thus, this study sheds light on the postmodern deconstructive aspect of Adnan’s literary text, involving how the author challenges the traditional apocalyptic narrative by foregrounding postmodern apocalyptic subjects. This last includes constant violence, international terror, the downfall of communities, and the subjection of human beings to world crises. These themes subvert the traditional apocalyptic narrative that establishes order, linearity and harmony and calls for Utopia. This study also highlights the collapse of historical metanarrative by drawing upon Frederic Jameson’s notion of ‘historical deafness’ and its consequences on the postmodern subject, including ‘schizophrenia’ and the ‘waning of affect’. It also examines the role of art, a remedy presented as a counter-response to turbulent postmodern times. It transpired that the postmodern vision advocates historical authenticity and reflects a pessimistic society’s experiences of despair and the loss of reality.

Postmodern Elements in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Postmodernism is considered a break with 19th-century realism and before that, the project of Enlightenment dealt with the issue of transformation of outer phenomenal reality to an internal consciousness of the human mind. As a result, the using postmodernism subconsciously reveals and manifests their inner consciousness through what they do. It rejects the concept of absolute reality. Mostly, postmodernist writers support the premise that ‘irrational is real’. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948) is considered to be the leading playwright amongst many others. This play derives its inspiration from European existentialism which was one of the foremost philosophical schools within continental tradition. In Waiting for Godot, there are no pre-determined rules or any unity in time, place or action. The ending of it can be interpreted in many different ways. The author of this paper has tried to put the play in the European context and highlighted the features which are considered to be the hallmark of postmodernism.

Intertextuality and Autointertextuality as a Means of Conceptualization of the Author’s World Perception

Postmodern writings stand out with vivid intertextuality. To study postmodern literary texts ignoring intertextual ties or intertexts would mean to do a vain study. In the given article it is suggested to carry out conceptual analysis of literary texts from the perspectives of intertextuality and autointertextuality. As an example can serve the conceptual analysis of the concept ‘’smile’’ in J.Fowles’ novel ‘’The Magus’’. J.Fowles is an outstanding British writer whose writings have deep psychological and philosophical ideology which can have a great impact on different generations. He touches upon such issues as ‘’love’’, ‘’freedom’’, ‘’ death’’, ‘’isolation’’ and so on. Freedom is reflected nearly in all his writings from various aspects. The novel ‘’The Magus’’ is no exception. The conceptual analysis on this novel will help the investigator to study J. Fowles’ unique individual perception of the world The conceptual analysis of the concept ‘’smile’’ is essential first of all in the sense that only due to the profound understanding of this concept in the novel ‘’The Magus’’ the reader will be able to decode the message of the novel completely. Actually the key concept of ‘’The Magus’’ is ‘’freedom’’. However, only deep understanding of the concept ‘’smile’’ will allow the reader to perceive the ‘’freedom’’. The study reveals that according to J. Fowles in order to be truly free man should ‘’learn to smile’’, but in a specific sense, they should have a smile that is full of good metaphysical good humour like in a dramatic irony, which itself is a manifestation of freedom.

Requiem, or The Temptation of Antonio (Tabucchi)

Among the various distorting mirrors that characterize his works, in the novel Requiem, Antonio Tabucchi places an Egyptian saint (St. Antony the Abbot), a Nordic school altarpiece (Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Antony) and a postmodern writer (himself), three interdependent elements within the semantic horizon of this work. The article intends to deepen this theme, showing how the investigation of the relationship between factors scattered around the four corners of Europe can prove to be a key to reading this work and, maybe, also shed light on the mechanisms of Tabucchian writing in general.