Kravets E. Neo-mythological Tendencies in John Updike's Novels.

The dissertation presents complex research of the neo-mythological tendencies in John Updike's novel heritage. His key novels (The Centaur, Brazil, The Witches of Eastwick, The Widows of Eastwick) are analyzed in terms of fictional mythologizing. Different forms of introducing mythological material into the text by the writer are identified. The analysis of the writer's works ascertained the general evolu-tion of Updike's mythopoetics: from the direct, explicit forms (chiefly open intexts and separate parallel plots) to the indirect, implicit, allusive forms diluted into the plot and principally based upon a system of motifs. Updike's correlation between myth and empiric reality also evolves: from a monomythological, while polymotif, structuration of the novel contents into a polymithological one. The bilevel structure of Updike's novel was detected, i.e. the everyday and mythological levels. However, from the early to the later novels the number and importance of intermediate levels (social, his-torical, ethnographic, etc.) increases. These levels introduce myth into the everyday life and the everyday life into myth more seamlessly. For John Updike, the degree of the uniqueness in the author's neo-mythologization depends upon the selection of primal myths and their differentiation, from the other hand, upon the influences of mass myths the U.S. contemporary for Updike has and the readers' mass preferences. Thus, the works by Updike as a neo-mythologist enable studying the two-way process of "new myth creation" in the American literature of the 20th century. The process shows how and why novel-myths and novels about myths are produced in the USA, but also starts to emphasize the accelerated transforma-tion of the myths into stereotypes, hence, a quick social and artistic death of these neo-myths.