THE PROBLEM OF POSTMEMORY THROUGH THE LENS OF POSTMODERN POETICS (based on the novel «Everything is Illuminated» by Jonathan Safran Foer)

Abstract

The research focuses on the problem of postmemory and aims to analyze the mechanism of its actualization in a literary text. The work is based on the understanding of postmemory proposed by the American researcher Marianne Hirsch as a kind of collective ideas about the past that are formed by the descendants of people who have survived traumatic experiences. The peculiarity of this type of memory lies in its mediated nature, indirect connection with the object or source of memory, as well as the use of imagination and conjecture. Historiographical metaliterature with its rich arsenal of tools and artistic techniques provides ample opportunities for the mental reconstruction of postmemory as a link in the severed collective experience. The postmodern novel-chronicle «Everything is Illuminated» by Jonathan Safran Foer, used as the material of this study, is a good example of the kind. The work is loosely based on Foer's real-life journey to Ukraine in search of the answers to the questions about his family history and their fate during the Holocaust. The research relies on descriptive linguistic methods combined with contextual and interpretive analysis. With the help of rather unusual literary and linguistic means, the author clearly demonstrates the inability of the realistic linear narrative form to describe the traumatic experience that is central to the novel. «Everything is Illuminated» challenges the possibilities of representing such trauma by exploring the limits of traditional language and experimenting with a pastiche of styles in an attempt to speak of the unspeakable. The analysis revealed the following most important means of modelling the postmemory effect in the novel: the choice of several narrators to convey a multiplicity of points of view on the depicted events and to reveal the truth about the silenced moments of history; the use of broken English and stream-of-consciousness techniques to reflect the psychological depth of the situation; magical realism to explore the family past that could not be restored in reality and to emphasize the main points presented in other themes; time jumps to convey trauma that lies beyond both linguistic and temporal dimensions.