Research of mythologism and myth plot as element of plot structure in Russian prose of end of 20 - beginning of 21 centuries
The article describes the change of character and principles of mythologism in the Russian prose at the end of the 20th c. And the problem of search of approaches to the explanation of how myths are used in the latest works. In the 1990s-2000s many works appear showing constant interest of modern literature in myths (A. Kim's Onliriya, L. Ulitskaya's Medea and Her Children, A. Korolyov's Aaron, A. Slapovsky's First Second Advent, and Syndrome of Phoenix, P. Krusanov's Bite of an Angel, T. Tolstaya's Kys', S. Bogdanova's Jokasta's Dream, M. Shishkin's A Hair of Venus, Yu. Volkov's Oedipus the Tsar, Ye. Chizhov's Orestes and the Sons, V. Makanin's Asanas, etc.). The mythologization problem in the prose of the boundary of the 20th-21st centuries is defined by the influence of traditions of postmodernism and popular literature, as well as by the complication of the plot structure of modern prosaic works. The result of post-modernist tradition influence on modern literature is a continuous generation of new mythologies with new plot lines and devastation of the ancient and the author's myths (postmodernism witnessed demythologization, reality deconstruction, and myths - social, cultural, archaic - were used as a material for doubt and destruction; mythologemes of world culture were decomposed and re-composed in alien contexts). The result of popular literature influence is that the mythological thread in the latest works does not influence events, the mythological motive carries out the function of the thesaurus element of a modern mass reader. Plots of modern prose can have several lines of narration of different eras and different modalities (an autobiographical line, a fantasy, a myth plot), the line of an event of the letter, text creation, etc. Modern literature does not use the traditional plot narration, but it does not mean it lacks the plot structure. In the article a hypothesis is made that the link between the plots of works of the 2000s with the plots of myths is possible, first of all, at the structural level, as the value immanent to the myth is that events form a constant structure (C. Levi-Strauss). The concept '' myth plot'' assumes a certain semantic kernel and can be considered as one of the hermeneutic models enclosed in a modern work. In the article it is offered to reveal the structural elements of the plots of myths in the literature of the boundary of the 20th-21st centuries and to investigate the equivalence between the events of the plot of the myth and of the present. The review of plot-related concepts of structuralists (V. Propp, C. Bremond, A.J. Greimas) and scholars of Novosibirsk School showed that the analysis of the structure of a plot (the myth plot, in particular) demands identification and description of certain elements: predicate (function), hero (actant), chronotope (universe). The link between separate structural elements in plots of the prose of the 1990s-2000s is not in the narration, but in equivalences (V. Schmidt). Equivalences between the myth plot line and the modernity is one of the ways for the contemporary authors to overcome the disintegrity of the worldview and to model at the plot level the intermediary existence of a modern person in the modern intermediary chronotope.
Keywords
русская проза рубежа XX-XXI вв, мифологизм, сюжет мифа, структурализм, эквивалентности, Russian prose of boundary of 20-21 cc, mythologism, myth plot, structuralism, equivalencesAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Rytova Tatyana A. | National Research Tomsk State University | rytova1967@mail.ru |
Shchipkova Yelena A. | National Research Tomsk State University | elena1331@bk.ru |
References

Research of mythologism and myth plot as element of plot structure in Russian prose of end of 20 - beginning of 21 centuries | Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiya – Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 2012. № 4 (20). DOI: 10.17223/19986645/20/11