The thesis presents an analysis of poetics and problems of three novels (“Foe”, “The Master of Petersburg”, “Elizabeth Costello”) by J. M. Coetzee which were written in the different creative work periods of the writer and identified as postmodernist modifications of the novel about an artist. The aesthetic dominant of the novel about an artist has been determined as well as the main elements of intentional form of this genre variety: the main character-artist, the conflict between Life and Art, specific chronotope (three forms of time and space respectively), three-parted plot structure that consists in the life-story of the artist, the work of art and the reasoning about art, the latter becomes the subject of the author’s reflection and self-reflection. According to the critical works about this genre variety, it can be ascertained that the novel about an artist usually appears at the turn of the historical ages, one of which is the Age of Postmodern. In the novel about an artist of the 20th-21st centuries the genre form itself has been changed: both, the displacement of an emphasis on the one of components of plot structure and the postmodernist tendency to genre convergence, lead to the formation of new hybrid forms – modifications of the novel about an artist: a novel-as-biography, a novel about the novel, a novel-essay. The main features of the postmodern novels about an artist are self-reflexivity that reveals the creative process and intertextuality that appeals to the reader, provoking him/her to active work in getting all meanings out of the novel.
All three modifications of the novel about an artist are singled out in J. M. Coetzee’s novels (“Foe”, “The Master of Petersburg”, “Elizabeth Costello”) as it is confirmed by the complex analysis of the author’s works. “The Master of Petersburg” is a novel-as-biography, (a term by P. M. Kendall), because the artist’s biography is put on the foreground and the “literary element” is used in the construction of a life-writing, displacing the genuine biography. In this novel the emphasis is transferred from the life-writing to the process of creativity and creation of the “new world”. The novel “Foe” is centered on the creative act, namely the process of writing the novel which we are reading. Studying this novel, we have marked out a two-plan structure: 1) narration about the characters (novel of characters); 2) narration about an act of narration (the world of literary creation, the process of creating a “novel of characters”) – metastructural level, indicating such a modification as a novel about the novel. The boundary between both “worlds” can be transcended only by the author-creator of the text – Susan Burton, the main character in Coetzee’s novel. In “Elizabeth Costello” the writer shifts the focus to the reasoning about art in the form of insertable texts (essays), and due to this fact the novel about an artist is transformed into the novel-essay. The integrity is kept by an interlacing of the novel and essay plans which supplement each other and organize a complicated, combined artistic and philosophical structure of the work.
It has been revealed that the ontological conflict of the novel about an artist between Life and Art (Artist and Human, Artist and Society or God) in the novels “Foe”, “The Master of Petersburg” and “Elizabeth Costello” by J. M. Coetzee changes under the influence of the concept of “Death of the Author” according to which the impersonal text rather than an independent author becomes the source of the statement. Now the author turns into a scriptor, and the main role is played by the reader, that unites all the possible meanings of the text in the process of reading.
In the postmodernist novel about an artist, the characterization of the artist changes: the character acquires the same features that modern world has – unreliability, instability, uncertainty. The character of the artist becomes a quotation, reminiscence, and sometimes even a simulacrum which is the incarnation of a worked copy, a literary stamp. The whole system of images has the nature of artificiality because the characters constantly emphasize their “book” status, accentuating their creativity and falsehood. Instead of focusing on the life and personality of an artist, in postmodernist novels contemporary writers stress on the creative consciousness of the artist, in which there are metamorphoses that do not depend on the will of the author: the surrounding reality is transformed into the world of art, and reality is perceived as a literary text.
In the analyzed novels the whole system of motifs is presented: the motif of quest, travelling, play and death which are subjected and closely related to the leitmotif of the novel about an artist – the motif of creativity / creation. The chronotope of the novels “Foe”, “The Master of Petersburg” and “Elizabeth Costello” has a three-part structure (that is appropriate for the novel about an artist), therefore, we
