Discourse of the extreme in the modern literature of the urals

Abstract

According to the authors of the article, works of fiction that introduce shocking ideas into aesthetic reality fit into the general contemporary discourse of the extreme. Literary texts marked by the extreme are based on the principles of taboos violation which are expressed in the space of creativity as an invasion of forbidden topics, a rethinking of the concept of good and evil, a deviation from the norm of any type (from moral and ethical to linguistic). The material for the analysis is the modern Ural writers’ works of various genre-generic forms: a book of poems “The Gospel of Lucifer” by A. Vavilov (2019), a novel “Department” by A. Salnikov (2018), a play “Claustrophobia” by K. Kostenko (2003). The paper shows how the category of the extreme manifests itself at all levels of the text: from problem-thematic (total alienation from traditional norms of life, identity crisis) to specific methods of world modeling associated with the image of the impaired consciousness of a modern person (zoomorphic code, dead-end space, obligatory motives of aggression) and linguistic extremism, based on prison and militaristic vocabulary, on taboo lexical units of the body bottom. Despite genre-generic difference of the works selected for the analysis, there is a similarity of the methods of depicting modern reality and the worldview of a person within the framework of everyday life combined not only by the extremely unusual (i. e., extreme) but also beyond the limits of the allowable and permissible. This poetics includes a lot of grotesque methods of amplification and redundancy with the help of which the recognizable features of modern reality are sharpened and depicted. © 2020 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.