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UDC 821.111-3
DOI 10.20339/PhS.3-24.116
Shulyatyeva Dina V.,
Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor at School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies
National Research University Higher School of Economics
e-mail: dshulyatyeva@hse.ru, dsh64@yandex.ru
In this article the author examines the problematization of genre conventions in the novel “Mr. Vertigo” by Paul Auster. Auster’s creative search is characterized by a special interest in intermediality. Auster’s interest in cinema also reveals itself in the way he complicates the narrative in his own novels: This complication takes the form of variations of genre conventions, among which there are both literary and cinematic genres. Such a “transfer” of genre conventions of cinema into literature makes it possible to transform the reader’s interaction with the narrative, to problematize the dialogue between literature and cinema. In the reader, Auster invariably sees a viewer with the appropriate cinematic experience, and therefore, in working with genres within a literary narrative, Auster resorts to variation: to literary genres already familiar to the reader, he adds cinematic genres, alternating with one another. The use of the principle of variations in the construction of a narrative, as a result, allows him to achieve several effects: the alternation of genre conventions participates in modeling a high-speed experience for the reader, allows him to compare his reading experience with a similar one in cinema (with the moving image in it); actively alternating conventions switch the reader’s attention from what directly happens to the hero, on how and with the help of which (genre) models his experience is presented. This “switching” also leads to the fact that the reader in such a narrative is more concerned not with what actually happened to the hero, but with what could have happened — and thanks to the variety of conventions that replace each other, it has acquired the semantics of the fictional, only possible, potential in the narrative.
Keywords: bildungsroman, cinematic genres, experientiality, intermediality, variations, Paul Auster
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