2022 Issue №2

This article seeks to explore the possibility of applying psychological and neurobiological data with regard to the notions of “self”, “narrative identity”, and “depersonalization” to the case of autobiography as a type of text. The analysis highlights the importance of memory being a cognitive process that underlies any self-narration. Using Will Self’s work “Walking to Hollywood: memories of before the fall” as case study, we investigate an authorial technique of mimicking the gradual failure of the narrative identity by the subject of the autobiogtaphical narrative, so “the strategy of depersonalization”. The article, therefore, is structured in three parts with a conclusion. The first two introductory sections are about the crucial importance of interdisciplinary approach in cognitive linguistic studies, and memory’s interpretative significance in constructing self-narration. Ultimately, in section 3, we offer an analysis of some extracts from the text in question which show how “the strategy of depersonalization” is being omplemented by the author.

The main intention of the article is to prove that the unique style of Handke’s creative individuality reflects his special life-saving SOMEONE, who resists in his negative dialectic the dictatorship of another pernicious SOMEONE who sets the false movement. In a remarkable symmetry to post-structuralist theories about the “totalitarianism of language”, Handke experiences in his own verbalized existence the pernicious power of some of this totalitarianism, seeking to free himself from it in a kind of poetic resistance to the dictatorship of those discursive practices of the Western world that lead to the “death of the subject” (Foucault). After Handke’s essays on Yugoslavia had been published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in 1996, where he supported the Serbs, he became persona non grata not only in Kosovo and Sarajevo, but also among the intellectual elite of the West. Therefore, the Nobel Prize came as a complete surprise for the author and sparked a furious protest from the world’s leading media giants. One of the conclusions of the article, based on a hermeneutic study of Handke’s works, reflects the author’s conviction that the great uniqueness of Handke’s creative phenomenology lies in his attempt to break out of the destructive gravity of some killer language in an effort to deconstruct it in search of the original proto-structure for the acquisition of the Other, in which there is still Someone Else with his Other “Me-Language”. Handke’s poetic evolution, or even revolution, is in keeping with not only post-structuralist attempts to “save the language”, such as in Foucault’s transgression, but also with the biblical warning that “Life and death are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18: 21). The innovative potential of this work lies in the attempt of hermeneutic penetration into the phenomenological eidos of Handke on the basis of the symbolic and at the same time dialectical method supposing that the Phenomenon of Handke is the living antithesis of the post-structuralist theory of the “death of the author” and that being is still “breaking through” into the narrative of modern culture. The work is relevant due to the scientific, literary and linguistic and cultural uniqueness of Handke, as well as the fact that it is a living proof of the connection between the cognitive potential of art and politics.

The article deals with the peasant emigration to America in the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz “For Daily Bread” and Vladimir Korolenko “Without Language”. The plot structure of the stories and the system of characters are contrasted for spatial oppositions “close — far” and “homeland — foreign land”. It is demonstrated that the peasant traditional patriarchal picture of the world is in conflict with the image of America as an urban civilization of modern times. The authors reveal the specifics of Sienkiewicz’s and Korolenko’s disclosure of American themes. It is emphasized that the vision of America by both writers is ambivalent. From the point of view of Polish and Russian writers, America gives a chance for individual fulfillment, but the positions of both authors indicate their patriotism. This is confirmed, in particular, by nostalgic motifs in the novels “For Daily Bread” and “Without Language”.