MYTHMAKING AND UNMAKING: POSTSTRUCTURALIST MYTH OF THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT


  • V. I. Lipina

Abstract

The prevailing critical myth of the subject’s death is reconsidered in the paper with reference to the writings of hard-core American postmodernist writers: John Barth and Stephen Dixon. The paper’s focus is on how an escalated poststructuralist attack on the concept of subjectivity (Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Foucault) resulted in misreading the complexity of culture at the end of the 20th century. Many believe that in postmodernismMan dis appears, the author is dead, and the art itself lacks originality – thus almost everything that constitutes the humanistic subject of art, is undermined. The analysis revealswhat happens to today’s postmodernist literature, what contradictions there exist between the poststructuralist myth of the death of the subject and artistic subjectivity as a fiction of selfhood, which is still constructed in American postmodernist literature. The works of John Barth, Stephen Dixon are at the center of the research. The analysis shows that postmodernist writers are trying to preserve the human matter, challenging and reconstituting the place of a character and an omniscient author as the main literary conventions. Thus,the contemporary myth of «subject in crisis» is demythisized by the writers, revealing a dialectical process of transcending the subject as an individual ego in the direction of discovering either the commonly human, or essentially humanistic.Keywords: death of the subject, subjectivity, author, poststructuralism, postmodernism.
Published
2015-09-01
How to Cite
Lipina, V. I. (2015). MYTHMAKING AND UNMAKING: POSTSTRUCTURALIST MYTH OF THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT. Anglistics and Americanistics, (12). Retrieved from https://anglistika.dp.ua/index.php/AA/article/view/137