Tarassyuk Y. Poetics and Problems of Fran?ois Mauriac's Early Novels.

The thesis is the first comprehensive research of early prosaic literary works by the French author Francois Mauriac (1885-1970) within literary studies in the prospect of poetic peculiarities and problematic complexes of the noted author's oeuvre formation. The systematization and classification of literary-critical research dedicated to the French author's oeuvre as well as the main problem fields of Mauriac's studies were performed and singled out in the present work. It was ascertained that historic-literary, biographic and receptive approaches dominate in Mauriac's studies, which is why the address to early author's texts is a rare case and a few existing research works dedicated to this phase of his creative work consider it in the light of his mature oeuvre and his personality as an aesthetically and problematically experimental one respectively. Several modern literary studies methods with author-text dominating approach like hermeneutics, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, which study certain literary phenomena contextually as well as independently, gave possibilities to analyze Mauriac's early novels as self-sufficient texts. The term "early literary work poetics", which reflects two key qualities of an early text: an author's creative laboratory and a personality's limit experience, was introduced for emphasizing of optic position and the field of research. Sense constituting function of an early text was studied based upon the novel "Questions of Precedence", for understanding of which the concept of "zero text", which comprises the part of the novel that changes the author himself, was introduced. "Zero text" concept is self-clarified and is clarified via itself thus transforming the text understanding approach and art understanding approach generally.