CC BY
8Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2018 11) 511-521
УДК 82'09
"The New" as a Theoretical Problem and Contemporary Literary Context
Alexander A. Zhitenev*
Voronezh State University 1 Universitetskaya pl, Voronezh, 394018, Russia
Received 10.01.2017, received in revised form 07.03.2018, accepted 16.03.2018
The article deals with theoretical approaches to the analysis of the new in literature and substantiates the idea that the most important aspects of newness are emotional community, projective model and sensitivity. The options for interpretation of the new in modern Russian literature are researched on the basis of the literary-critical articles by A. Narinskaia and G. Dashevsky.
Keywords: newness, theory of literature, community, affectivity, project.
The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project № 18-012-00476 "Aesthetic novelty and literariness as a problems of theory and creative writing of the XX century: avant-gardism (1920-1930-ies) and postmodernism (1970-1980-ies)".
DOI: 10.17516/1997-1370-0245.
Research area: philology.
Introduction into the problem
In the evaluation of artistic practices of the 20th century the criterion for the new has always played a critical role. Newness of form was associated with the idea of re-structuring the world by means of art, and regarded as a forerunner of dramatic changes in all spheres of social practices. The avant-garde's absolutization of the new was proclaimed both in declarations of creative movements and in the theory of aesthetics.
Perhaps, the most consistent apologist of newness was Theodor Adorno, who devoted multiple of pages to the formulation of the concept and characteristic of the contexts where it can be used. In his works the transformation of
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* Corresponding author E-mail address: superbia@mail.ru
the new into a fetish of aesthetic consciousness happens to be a natural consequence of the modern society development: "In an essentially non-traditional society, aesthetic tradition is a priori dubious. The authority of the new is that of the historically inevitable. <...> The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction, with its promise of undiminished plentitude" (Adorno, 2001: 34-35). Aware of the abstract character of the new, of its being a "blind spot", of the possibility for it to freeze in its cliché, Adorno, nevertheless, believes the "voracious vortex" of anti-traditional energy to be the most typical expression of modernity, the manifestation of art's bend to the situationality of fireworks. However, as the trends for creative endeavour
were differentiated and its formal capacities got exhausted, as the impossibility of utopical tasks became evident, there rose the necessity to revaluate the progressive vision of art. The new understanding of historicity of the artistic process happened to be associated with the loss of integrity of the problem field and the idea of time reversibility: the gaps separating different ages were not perceived as absolute any more, and the idea of the global innovative context became out-of-date. The new got perceived as a derivate from a variety of circumstances, losing both its radicalness and the reaction it had normally caused.
It was the crisis of the "new" that was interpreted by the late 20th century theorists as the "end of art", which caused the necessity to review the existing concept of cultural development. In Russian context, this idea was best articulated by A.V. Mikhailov: "Progressive art is not possible anymore, for you cannot be more progressive than emptiness that suddenly appears. As a target. <...> All opportunities of art we have ever thought of are now right in front of us", the artist "has nowhere to go, he has to take whatever he has here" (Mikhailov, 1997: 864-865).
In this vein, one of the most important problems of both creative practice and theory of culture is the problem of the new in the post-historical age, irrespective of its relation to any global aesthetic projects. Even the first attempts to evaluate modern art situation outside the conceptual postmodern system are connected with the search of the measure for "modernity" and re-establishment of the range of associations caused by the terms of "new" or "up-to-date". One of the most resonant solutions for it was suggested by B. Groys in his book "On the New" (1988). According to him, "the new" is a result of valorisation and re-adjustment of values. Newness is connected with the shift of the border between the culturally mastered and the profane;
the new is possible when this border exists. In this case, the limits for the new are set by the adaptive capacity of art and formulation of the axiological a priori.
According to B. Groys, in the postmodern age the new is still produced, but it is no longer associated with the idea of expressing the truth. This situation of the "last new" happens to be the best reason for philosophic reflection. For a philosopher, innovation is a "negative adaptation", an attempt to broaden the space of cultural memory by means of creating "things contrasting the tradition". The new is derived from the perception of art as an "archive" excluding any change for standard pieces' preservation. The logic of innovation is simple: "The source for new things in culture is the zone consisting of all the things still uncovered with the existing system of storage and control. <...> The mechanisms of innovation are the mechanisms regulating the relations between the valorised cultural memory brought to a hierarchical order on one hand and the valueless profane medium on the other" (Groys, 1993: 143-144).
Another opposite milestone interpretation of the new was suggested by I. Smirnov in his work "Video Sequence. Historical Semantics of Cinema" (2009). According to him, the new in culture ripens as an "other" to its essential conceptual constants: "The search for factors, motivating history from outside, <...> is nothing but projective subjectivisation of the comprehended object from the external cognitive position. Objectively speaking, the Other is immanent to history. Therefore, history unwinds inside the person bearing the Other in himself. That is what our mortality is like to all of us" (Smirnov, 2009: 5).
A specific opinion on the new in literature was suggested by P. de Man in his work "Blindness and Insight" (1971). From the point of view of this theorist, in cultural context
the potential of the new is connected with the dissociation of the cultural memory, which creates unlimited opportunities for articulating aesthetic problems and creative alternatives. The algorithm for innovation is associated with antagonism and interdependence of history and contemporariness, with the interconnection between immediateness and absence of a set pattern in categorization of the world: "Moments of genuine humanity thus are moments at which all anteriority vanishes, annihilated by the power of an absolute forgetting. <...> Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure" (De Man, 2002: 197).
Problem setting
Even though they do not cover the whole diversity of concepts of the new suggested in the last thirty years of the 20th century, the named approaches are pretty typical, inter alia, in the way of solution simplification. The following three appear to be the most important ones.
First of all, the view of the new as a result of crossing the semantic and axiological border suggests the homogeneity of the two media and the emotional concept-making; the new is then realized and intentionally modelled. In the meanwhile, the practice of any artistic discovery demonstrates a different logic: the new is excluded from the interpretative horizon of the subject and recognized as an opportunity for derivation, not pre-determined with one's cultural or existential experience. The new means potential system relations, strange to the subject, and, for this very reason, foreseeing some radical and irreversible changes.
Recalling the succinct formula suggested by M. Mamardashvili, reality enters the world in a transcendent way: "Immediacy, or aesthesis,
includes distinguishing understanding. <...> An event of aesthesis cannot be derived by thought, invented, or extracted from properties of things; it either exists or it does not. <.> This fact cannot be set by any sort of thinking, it is impossible to extract from it", and that is exactly the fact that determines its becoming an "amplifying event" expanding the consciousness (Mamardashvili, 2000: 214).
Secondly, the thought of discontinuity of cultural memory and reformation of coordinates as the main condition for the new does not take the initial retrospective activeness of the new and reorganization of the experience field into account, relying on the newly obtained reference point. The new denies the past, but this denial foresees invention of a tradition and effort made to establish some surprising interpretations, not destruction of archives.
In this regard it makes sense to pay some serious attention to the idea of C. Greenberg that in modernism the new is forced, as creation of the whole system of art-related concepts all over again is a chance to overcome the persistence of popular perception: "And yet all the great and lasting modernist creators were reluctant innovators at bottom, innovators only because they had to be <. > So I come at last to what I offer as an embracing and perdurable definition of Modernism: that it consists in the continuing endeavour to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by the relative democratization of culture <...> Thus the whole enterprise of modernism, for all its outward aspects, can be seen as backward-looking" (Greenberg, 2010: 137).
Thirdly, in the listed concepts the new is not differentiated; however, its qualitative characteristics are obviously very important. Using the terminology of J. Assman, we may say that the new may be possible as something existing here and now, within the communicative memory,
and it is also possible as something constituting the background for literary actuality, the new of the cultural memory. In the first case the subject matter is the informal interaction medium, and in the second it is codified memory (Assman, 2004: 58-59). In both cases the new exists within the opposition system as an articulation for actual problems and a way of solution development or as something that forms the problem horizon and reveals the capacity of the selected method.
The above ideas outline the three key properties of the new: it is phenomenological, projective, and communicative. Let us explain each term.
Should we rely on the fact the new is something excluded from a subject's experience, it would be correct to say that it retains its status as long as it stays beyond any categorization and systematic interpretation. In other words, the new is something existing within experience, can be phenomenologically measured and defined with affective terms. For this reason one of the basic methods of researching the new is reconstruction of series of receptive definitions connected with the new, revealing the structure of the experience. To some extent, the process may be guided by the receptive patterns of formalism with its intention to bring "tangibility" in the assessment of literary texts to the fore, while "newness" happens to be "connected with sensualist vitalism, which per definitionem does not set the question of meaning, moreover, intentionally leaves it aside" (Hansen-Love, 2001: 172).
The nature of the new is projective in the sense that it is always connected with creative practice modelling; its description is no analytical, but declarative, for it prescribes the direction for search. The task of the researcher is to restore the system of conditions used to qualify something as new and true within a certain horizon. As pointed out by R. Krauss, originality is the key myth of avant-garde, where originality becomes
"an organicist metaphor referring not so much to formal invention as to sources of life, <...> the potential for continuous acts of regeneration, a perpetuation of self-birth" (Krauss, 2003: 159160). But it is a myth as it is, and as any other intellectual construct it may be characterized through a system of values, a world outlook and aesthetic preconditions.
The avant-guard system of ideas reoriented both the artist and the audience from the "big time" to modern cultural situation, making the society, i.e. an establishment where people are "united not by choice, but by some a priori divisible affective conditions" (Petrovskaia, 12: 8), the only addressee of art. If, as Iu. Khabermas writes, absolutization of the "transient, ephemeral" and the "cult of the new mean honouring of the actuality which again and again gives birth to the subjectively filled past" (Khabermas, 2005: 10), it leads to legitimisation of the new by placing it on the crossroads of some dialogic contexts. The "new" does not exist outside the situation of mutual "infection", active discussion and expansion, beyond the effect of "inclusion". In this regard, another aspect of the "new" analysis is the research of principles of the affective society, stratification of the new and logic of correlation between the "hot" and "cool" new.
The situation of the 2010-s literature within the given coordinates is of great interest, for, as many participants of literature admit, it is mostly characterised as depressed. How is it possible to evaluate the new in this case and what is it about? Let us try to find out, relying upon "Selected Articles" by G. Dashevsky (2015) and "Not a Chaffinch" by A. Narinskaia (2016). The axiological positions of the two authors are close enough to neglect the differences and interpret the similarities between them. Taking the listed points into account, let us try to characterize the distinctive features of
society, directions of projectivity and structure of affectivity.
Characteristics of society
To introduce everything said below, let us remark that the list of features of an affective community is open and is not strictly systemized; it can be reconstructed with the stereotypical evaluations, interpretative patterns and other automatisms interpreted by the critics as universal for a number of recipients or reflecting their own ideas.
The starting point in the works by Dashevsky and Narinskaia is the idea of personal indistinctiveness and dependence on the external form as the facts setting the framework for any evaluation. Speaking of prose by L. Ginzburg, G. Dashevsky sees it as a "novel of impermeability of common life, where people are accepted only after getting cut and cropped equal" (Dashevsky, 2015: 20), and in the essay of W. Gombrowicz this idea is expanded with the thought that "it is not some abstract culture that imposes a form on a person, <. > but just a random passer-by" (Dashevsky, 2015: 107), and, therefore, falseness is universal. Such understanding of "cultural violence" makes deliberate attention to everyday life some news of art. That is how A. Narinskaia explains the success of "Olive Kitteridge" series: "Affections, failures, the dreams of weak, poorly articulated weird people that do not come true, are not just regarded as something valuable and important, but examined through an amazingly powerful magnifying glass" (Narinskaia, 2016: 254). It is important that the falseness escapes from reflection and, according to Narinskaia, can be even found in the advantages: "The age <...> emphasizes everything. It turns prominence into arrogance, brightness into vulgarity, and light-mindedness into stupidity" (Narinskaia, 2016: 183).
The narrowed field of freedom actualizes the motive of "insult" and mania for conspiracy theory. Dashevksy speaks of it a lot and for various reasons: "Within the past years conspiracy theory has turned into a common language of politics and culture. <. > Wherever we go, we encounter plots, falsified reality, <.> division of people into fools and the insiders" (Dashevsky, 2015: 63). This concentration on stereotypes is associated with cynicism, realized as a principle, and denial of any established opinions in favour of combinations of beautiful rhetoric formulae. The latter is a frequent motive in Dashevsky's essays: "This ability to create an impression that a right position is possible everywhere, in any moral or ideological dead end and in any catastrophe, cannot but remind us of the perpetual rightness of the eternally changing general line of the party" (Dashevsky, 2015: 39). Narinskaia also writes of cynicism as a result of multiple paradox positions in several sections of her book: "In today's intellectual field any structure and strictness appear to be single-dimensioned, and, therefore, are claimed to be ridiculous and not far-seeing enough" (Narinskaia, 2016: 33).
Both critics express the idea that personal indistinctiveness corresponds to the absolutization of hedonism and compromised intellectual standards. Naturally, for Dashevsky the Faust theme in cultural practice is associated only with negative value: "Faust is perpetually up-to-date as a symbol and is of no interest as a character. His symbolic topicality is understandable, for he personifies the idea of unrestricted expansion, unlimited search for power, knowledge, experience and pleasure. <.> But as a character Faust was interesting only as long as he was ready to pay for his unrestricted aspirations" (Dashevsky, 2015: 29-30). At that, if it is possible to stay away from the temptation of "expansive" attitude to the world, it is hardly possible to get rid of the habit to use one's own pain as a measure
of existence, and, according to Narinskaia, that is the thing that constitutes the background of modern existence: "The "What for?" pulsing in the brain poisons everything. Everything including all the most beautiful things that could ever happen to you. <.> Everything is seasoned with separate, acid bitterness, that stands next to nothing" (Narinskaia, 2016: 268).
In this context the most important trends of artistic projectiveness are connected with the attempts to thematize and get over the subject's obsession with himself, the weakness of his social bonds, the unarticulated obligations and absence of any strict imperatives.
Trends of projectiveness
According to Dashevsky, first of all, a modern thing is the one that sets a question of axiological coordinates and irreversibility of existential solutions. This set of preconditions can be used to characterise the songs of "Kireevsky" by M. Stepanova as up-to-date: "All borders we have here, all borders in the field of Russian consciousness can be overcome, since the most important border, between the dead and living, can be overcome as well. But <. > the fee for the communication between the world of the living and the underworld <.> is the impossibility of the future. The future is impossible without uncrossable borders and final breakups" (Dashevsky, 2015: 117). The unstructuredness and reversibility of the poles does not only narrow down the potentiality of changes, but makes reality impossible to review. Dashevsky speaks of this property of cultural consciousness in connection with the book by A. Rodionov: "This is a world that has no exterior, the frame of which cannot be surpassed in any direction, let it be upward, downward, to the side, to the past or the future, as for itself it is the heaven, the hell and all the rest" (Dashevsky, 2015: 164).
Naturally enough, Dashevsky associates the archaeology of modernity first of all with the experience of disclosing everything that was previously kept hidden and discreet, the practice of destructing the evident: "With each poem it (poetry) measures the current level of darkness, inexpressiveness, wordlessness" (Dashevsky, 2015: 158). In this practice every utterance implies indifference of analysis and denial of any smoothened assessments. The critic feels sorry for the non-canonized non-conformism which explicitly demonstrates that the modern culture froze "between captivity and sleep" (Dashevsky, 2015: 100), and that positive acceptance is a practice where any dialogue with the past requires "patience and art of both narrating and listening" (Dashevsky, 2015: 88).
The world without the exterior experiences difficulty in communication with any remote periods of culture, and practically, with any cultural reality the properties of which are not common in everyday life. In this regard cultural past is inseparably tied to horror, it needs to be adjusted before it is perceived. According to G. Dashevsky, "any 'old book', even with the most exciting story <...>, scares the modern reader in a certain way; for this reason we need and intermediate, a cinema director or a narrator" (Dashevsky, 2015: 142). The strategies of modernising the past, the ways of bringing names and books back into cultural life are the themes interesting both for A. Narinskaia and G. Dashevsky. Narinskaia, in particular, suggests that the "ability to pretend modern" (Narinskaia, 2016: 91) is one of the basic advantages of any culture interpreter. Typologically there are several options of actualizing a text.
First of all, modernity may be determined with the universality of the experience being the subject matter of the book, let it be existential or social one. Thus, for Narinskaia the "perpetual
topicality" of "Jane Eyre" is explained by the fact that the book expresses "common women's world outlook, if a governess <...> and a woman in love <...> are taken not in a certain, but in an existential way" (Narinskaia, 2016: 35). The modernity of Social-Revolutionaries' self-authentication of the 2000-s is explained with the similarity of N. Klimova and other revolutionaries of the 1900-s to Pussy Riot girls: "It would be wrong to treat this person as a model of one age, even if it is a very significant one. Many of her properties resonate with Russian life of any age and Russian life today" (Narinskaia, 2016: 31).
Secondly, topicality may be caused by the commonness of the social background and recognisability of the artistic picture of the world. According to A. Narinskaia, the first case is a way for interpreting Charles Dickens as an up-to-date writer, while the second reveals properties of modernity in "Alice" by Lewis Carroll: "Dickens <...> described capitalist reality, voicing the same disagreements with it as we feel now. <...> At the same time, Dickens' vision is not political; it is absolutely, ultimately, purely human. That is the reason why his books remain up-to-date" (Narinskaia, 2016: 119-121); "It is the pureness, even sterility of the nonsense that makes "Alice" such a powerful and such a scary text. <... > It expresses despair taken for granted and so common, that it looks ridiculous" (Narinskaia, 2016: 283).
Thirdly, topicality may be explained with the presence of some unoccupied slots in modern literature, demand for a certain type of character or idea. Thus, according to Dashevsky, it is the need for a clown's experience of cultural violence that makes W. Gombrowicz so important today: "Leaving the game with people and the form they impose is impossible; one only has to be aware of the game"; the fact that awareness of the game causes farce makes the writer so essential: "Gombrowicz is a truly vital figure here"
(Narinskaia, 2016: 108, 106). As Narinskaia suggests, the ability to recognize the greatness of a contemporary and still pertain independence of judgment makes the book by E. Proffer of Brodsky so valuable: "If this book had not been written, someone would have to make it up" (Narinskaia, 2016: 105).
However, these modes of modernity actualize themselves in the situation of a fruitless dialogue where the demand for evaluation is not so high and opinions are superficial. It is well explained in article by A. Narinskaia of "The 50 Year Argument" by M. Scorsese: "Our problem is absolute absence of any interest for discussion unless it is a violent fray. <...> Roughly speaking, we have almost lost all interest for the truth. And though the purpose of any intellectual discussion is not to find the truth but to talk about it, it always happens "in the presence of the truth". <... > However, we hardly believe in such opportunity" (Narinskaia, 2016: 84).
The conventionality of interpretations reveals the defects of valorisation, discloses voluntariness of assessments. Naturally, another trend of projectiveness is contemplation over the situation of stereotypes' perception and examples connected with the attempts to "edit" the cultural context, reserving the right to the unconditional truth. In the critical essays by A. Narinskaia this topic appears in association with Charles Baudelaire and Orson Welles: "Baudelaire really wanted to be understood and valued, but first of all to be understood and valued by those he understood and valued himself. <...> He did not even want to hear admirations from the strange "new" people holding him in "desperate owe" (Narinskaia, 2016: 237); "But it is a different thing that is the point of the book. It is incredibly intensive <...> decisiveness not to throw his life and films under the bus of interpretation, but to say his last word himself" (Narinskaia, 2016: 230).
The confusion of the coordinates makes appeal to various "figures of disagreement" feel "new", even if the experience of new valorisation of such figures turn out doubtful or unsuccessful. Giving negative reference to the book of A. Voznesensky by I. Virabov, A. Narinskaia, on the other hand, considers the task of writing a book of a writer "in the zone of disputability and unacceptance" to be important and appealing (Narinskaia, 2016: 72). G. Dashevsky characterizes the idea of an intriguingly modern literary project in a similar way: "The one who would really succeed in writing a novel of such an innocent victim, hated by everyone, unappealing, doubtful, and causing neither pity or emotion, would be a really good writer" (Dashevsky, 2015: 91).
The rise in the sensitivity threshold caused by insularity in the circle of stereotypes, reversibility of axiological oppositions, absence of demand for articulation of any sophisticated concepts predetermined the high significance of the "strong" affective solutions in modern literature.
Structure of affectivity
According to critical prose by G. Dashevsky and A. Narinskaia, the most distinctive feature of the "new" is the independence of the text from the reader's expectations, connected with the intensiveness of the affect. Thus, Dashevsky expresses sympathy to the book by I. Buruma dedicated to cultural conflicts of modernity, for its purpose is "to deflower readers' innocence" (Dashevsky, 2015: 84), and shows interest for the book by P. Eszterhazy telling of painful coping with the past: "All postmodernist skills of playing with tame and safe texts happened - in the case of Eszterhazy - to be an essential training before meeting a savage text that would play with you as it wants, and you would only record what happens to you, your body and your consciousness: tears,
suffocation, or afflux of blood" (Dashevsky, 2015: 87). Physiological naturalness and extremeness of emotive experience is an essential indicator of topicality for a literary text in Narinskaia's system of evaluation. The formula described in the article of letters by A. Platonov is a good illustration of it: "Reading these letters makes almost a chemical effect on the "consumer", as though a new activating substance intensifying senses and perception is injected into your soul"; "In any case, reading these letters is an essential experience. Painful, sobering, making your soul work" (Narinskaia, 2016: 147, 146).
However, to be perceived as the original, the book does not have to "work at the physiological level" or be "heart-rending" (Narinskaia, 2016: 141, 145); it is enough for it to resonate with the reader, demonstrating the way conventionality may not lead one away from reality, but return him back to it. This effect of the new was found by A. Narinskaia in V. Pelevin's book: "He offers you a living human being with some irresistibly charming thoughts. This step <...> into simplicity, accessibility as you call it, gives a striking effect of bringing the story into reality" (Narinskaia, 2016: 225). At the same time, G. Dashevsky remarks the possibility of abusing the "psychophysical" effects of reading: in the book by J. Littell he finds "a set of technologies affecting the reader with intensiveness, excess, run-up" (Dashevsky, 2015, 140), which, among other reasons, serves as a basis for a negative review.
The aspiration to keep away from the "laid-back, exciting chatter" (Narinskaia, 2016: 187) and approach more serious and critical talk nominates "soberness" to the most important positive values. It is the most frequent word in the value vocabulary of A. Narinskaia. The ideas associated with it include "deliberateness, high degree of detail, absence of speculation", "broad and accurate sight", "decisiveness to stick to one's positions but not to bring them up as the only ones
possible", "irony and calmness" (Narinskaia, 2016: 249, 90, 108). "Soberness" happens to be the most important property of G. Dashevsky's style, which is an unconditional etalon for Narinskaia: "What was the main thing about that voice (except for the intellect, knowledge, delicacy, irony and straightforwardness, which were, most important, not evil)? Oh yes, it was soberness. Soberness was, as I would put it, <...> his unique offer" (Narinskaia, 2016: 60).
In the critic essays of G. Dashevsky himself, "soberness" is classified as "clarity" suggesting fighting the illusions even when the victory does not bring any relief. The most distinctive illustration for such understanding of affectivity would be the analysis of personal notes of M. Gasparov: "We want to believe that clarity brings some answers, clues, and, therefore, hopes; we are used to thinking that if there is any light, it always leads to the end of the tunnel, not into a dead end. But Gasparov's clarity is the clarity of hopelessness, not an inspiring insight" (Dashevsky, 2015: 123).
It seems correct to complete this series with the critic's idea of Frost, for whom leaving personal experience aside is the condition for both "clarity" and professionalism: "The main thing about Frost's poems is not their optimism or pessimism, but the remote and cool mastery of operating all elements of text: the human and magical voices, despair and hope, temptation and duty" (Dashevsky, 2015: 195).
However, the absence of illusion and psychological naturalness are not the only affective modi of the "new"; another relevant emotional aspect is sentimentality, rehabilitated against the background of the century of catastrophes. In connection with the existential concept of "homelessness", G. Dashevsky mentions it in his article about the book by Jung Chang: "The idyll and the starting point is not home or a place, but moments of mutual help, sincerity, tenderness,
<...> moments of contemplating the hand-made and natural beauties. <...> The modern, which is, actually, a homeless person, finds this orientation not at the strong fundament of a home, but at a series of weightless moments, to be a resort for humanity so unexpectedly familiar to him" (Dashevsky, 2015: 77).
A. Narinskaia structures her apology of Ch. Dickens not without an aesthetic challenge within the same system of coordinates: "Dickens created a world tied with common suffering, common happiness and a common secret. <...> It is magic. <...> If Dickens today is an alive and wanted author (which is true), it is caused by his committal to reforms (read as social inclusion), by the sentimental nonsense and theatrical stuff" (Narinskaia: 2016, 119).
Conclusion
Therefore, according to G. Dashevsky and A. Narinskaia, the distinctive features of receptive society, against the background of which something may be perceived as new, are: absolutization of a private opinion, personal indistinctiveness, non-structuredness and reversibility of axiological positions, compromised intellectual standards and universality of hedonistic mindsets.
The trends of projectivity connected with the idea of topicality are intended to cope with these negative properties: they include a search for an external review different from common opinions, interest for categorial and axiological alternatives, for "modernising" exotic and long-forgotten cultural phenomena, for the "figures of disagreement" provoking wide discussions and for articulation of an axiological area of the "truth".
The affective set of the "new" is connected with the attempt to cope with regular indifference, weakness and inarticulation of emotional reactions. Emotional restrain and the wideness
of vision, desire for sophisticated sentiment, aspiration for extreme affective experience, texts with long after-taste requiring re-structuring of the consciousness appear new.
The way the properties of the society correlate to the trends of projectivity and structure of emotionality enables us to speak of the "potential" of the new in modern literature.
For G. Dashevsky and A. Narinskaia, the "new" does not appear as reality; it is an opportunity, it is classified as a suggestion and a declaration. The gap between what is given and what is set forward is too big to speak of radical newness in modern literature. Its expressions are local and appear in the context in an unsystematic and "occasional" way.
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«Новое» как теоретическая проблема и современный литературный контекст
А.А. Житенев
Воронежский государственный университет Россия, 394018, Воронеж, Университетская пл., 1
В статье рассматриваются теоретические подходы к анализу новизны в литературе и обосновывается мысль о том, что важнейшими аспектами нового являются рецептивное сообщество, проективность и модель чувствительности. Варианты концептуализации нового в современной русской литературе рассмотрены на примере литературно-критических статей А. Наринской и Г. Дашевского.
Ключевые слова: новое, теория литературы, сообщество, аффективность, проект.
Работа осуществлена в рамках гранта РФФИ № 18-012-00476 «Эстетическая новизна и литературность как проблемы теории и творческой практикиXXвека: авангардизм 1920-1930-х гг. и постмодернизм 1970-1980-х гг.».
Научная специальность: 10.00.00 - филологические науки.
