Narrative-Mentative Organisation of Memoirs and Reflections Collection Miloszʼs Abcʼs by C. Milosz
Вантажиться...
Дата
2025-12-02
Назва журналу
Номер ISSN
Назва тому
Видавець
Alfred Nobel University
Анотація
The article explores the narrative-mentative organisation of the collection of memoirs and reflect ions Miloszʼs ABCʼs (Abecadło, 1997) by Nobel Prize laureate C. Milosz. The object of the study is the collection Miloszʼs ABCʼs, which contains around 200 essays, different in subject and narrative structure. The aim of the article is to determine the specifics of these essays from the point of view of their narrativementative organisation, the factors of their text formation in postmodern discourse. The novelty of the scientific research is the chosen perspective of analysing the narrative-mentative nature of C. Milosz’s essay texts, which have not yet been studied from this point of view in modern literary studies. The chosen perspective involves the application of an appropriate research methodology based on the principles of narrat ive, biographical and structuralist methods.
In the course of the study of the collection Miloszʼs ABCʼs by C. Milosz, the following methodological steps have been completed: 1) the structure of the book has been analysed, in particular from the perspective of the interaction of narrative and reasoning components; 2) a classification of the Miloszʼs ABCʼs texts is proposed in terms of text-creation factors (narrative, narrative-mentative, mentative essays). The classification determined the author’s self-identification as a witness and participant in the cultural, historical and social life of the 20th century and at the same time its observer through philosophical, historical, theological, literary, topological, ethnic, and personal discourses; 3) representative samples of all text variants have been investigated in order to demonstrate the artistic (narrative and reflective) techniques of C. Milosz as an essayist. Conclusions are drawn about the uniqueness of the collection Miloszʼs ABCʼs as a postmodern work in terms of the practices of uniting reflection, fixation and testimony of facts and events of the past, ideas of openness of one’s own cultural map, rooted in the combination of personal history and the general memory of the era, as well as the depiction of time and space. In the texts, time and space are inextricably linked and form a unique memoir-reflective discourse of the essay collection. Space in the essays appears both physical (a specific place of events) and psychological (the space of the narrator’s thoughts, memories, feelings). It is determined that the collection presents the author’s biography as a deconstruction of his life against the background of the 20th century in cultural, historical, and philosophical registers. The biography itself appears in scattered fragments, in the format of a private encyclopedia, and the narrator is reproduced as a “self” dissolved in many images, locations, time slices, and figures, based on constant multiplicity, variability and construction depending on the described circumstances. This “self” is presented in various guises: as a writer, a philosopher, a lecturer, a critic, an essayist, whose narratives often turn into mentatives, and sometimes even demonstrate an exclusively reflexive type of consciousness.
The prospects of the study open up new possibilities for narrative-mentative analysis, which can be further applied in the process of studying ego-documents (letters, memoirs, diaries, essay collections, interviews) in European literatures.
Опис
Ключові слова
narrative, mentative, collection, essay, composition, organisation, postmodern work, наратив, ментатив, збірка, есей, композиція, організація, постмодерний твір