Institute of Philology, Journalism and Intercultural Communication, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, vvkotelevskaya@sfedu.ru
The article provides a brief overview of Russian and German modernist fiction, which depicts childhood and is dominated by childlike world perception and writing. The aim of this overview is to examine childhood and childishness not only as a theme, but also as an epistemological and constructive principle, which can be easily found in the works of Rilke, Walser, Benjamin, Mandelstam, Andrei Bely, and Sasha Sokolov. The work reveals the following particulars of the modernist text of childhood: autobiographicality of childhood memories is overcome by psychological, language-philosophical typification of the author’s childhood experience; poetic discoveries prove to be close to the findings in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis (Freud, Piaget, Jung and others); the narrator’s stand is ambivalent, balancing between the childish and mature points of view; from a childish, “barbarian” position the foundations of the literary canon and language as such are revised. The modernist text of childhood thus demonstrates the determinism of all worldviews by discourse (Jameson’s “prison-house of language”), including school and political discourses. It also overemphasizes the role of the poetological metatext.
modernist text of childhood; poetology; puer aeternus; ambivalence of the character; defamiliarization; R.M. Rilke; W. Benjamin; R. Walser; Andrei Bely; Sasha Sokolov
Download textFor citing: Kotelevskaya V.V. (2022). A child in the “prison-house of language”: towards the politics and poetics of writing in the modernist text of childhood. Human being: Image and essence. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow: INION RAN. Vol. 3(51): Power of literature – writer and authorities, pp. 184-203. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2022.03.07