In the dissertation, for the first time the concept “transgression” was used to study systematic demonstration of poetics of postmodern prose. The transgressive nature of the postmodern person’s consciousness provoked emergence of such interconnected signs of postmodern literature as the feeling of carnival (decentering any kind of “power”), fragmentation (the consequence of refusal from ratiocentricity) and frontier (the state that arises from ahistoric thinking of a postmodern person who lives in here and now situation and who has neither future nor past). Transgression has been admitted as the successor to modern concepts of structure and integrity. The basic categories of literary criticism in terms of withdrawing from steady to procedural nature of the phenomena marked by these categories have been reconsidered. The signs of transgressivity in Ukrainian and Polish postmodern prose are traced in the subject which is being depicted (the personal experience of the actor and the virtual reality of the modern culture) as well as in neo-mimesis (the postmodern principle of representing the virtual and sign reality). The very process of postmodern phenomena is exposed in the concept of the frontier. Mobility, relativity and temporality of postmodern phenomena are established through this concept. The text itself is positioned as a carnivalized territory without external limits and with internal changeable ones. It is not separated from paratext, context, off-text reality and appears in the process of its writing/perception. All players of the literary game (the author, the character, the narrator, the reader, the critic) are perceived as possible narrative focus and equal participants who are partially aware of the narrative situation.
Postmodern carnival irony does not go beyond the text, does not appeal to reality, and at the same time – as a manifestation of transgression – overcomes the integrity of the text, acts as an artistic device and the principle of postmodern thinking. This kind of irony serves as a means of self-writing, characterizes the conventional lines of the text, makes it impossible for any line of the text to dominate, unfolds within the text as a linguistic and narrative game, turns out to be intertextual and may acquire the form of sequence.
The distinction between postmodern carnival thinking and carnival thinking defined by M. Bakhtin consists in the following: a) in absence of orienting towards renewal, only towards exposing multiply manifestations of the phenomenon and the differences among them; b) in absence of appearing in the world beyond the carnival (literature); therefore carnival reconsideration concerns the game of signs, but not the meanings and relations of the real world, c) in the fact that the idea of value renewal is transformed into the idea of carnival equality.
Postmodern travel literature demonstrates various forms of transgressive combination of artistic, critical and pragmatic aspects, staying on the verge of documentary, artistic text and publishing genre. The purpose of the artistic travelling is switched from the moment when the character achieves the goal and returns home after a cognitive initiation to document the very process of travelling and passing through permanent identification with regard to the ever-changing Other.
In the postmodern prose text, the fragment is the only possible way of its existence, artistic strategy and artistic device. The postmodern text acts as the playing field in which players as participants possess equal rights but they play differently ordered fragments. Previous artistic traditions and techniques relate to such fragments. Fragmentation of the text contributes to balancing the rights of the author, the character, the reader, each of which has their own (partial) view on the artistic world. The plot is a combination of semantic rhizomatic plateaus that form temporary meanings and do not resort to comprehensive interpretation. Fragmentation can also be seen in the way temporal mental boundaries are reflected in a prosaic text through literary mapping, ethnolocalistic and subcultural language discourses. The postmodern fragment as a textual structure differs from the modern one in not involving integrity, completion. The postmodern fragment is determined by the process itself and the way it is taking place. This kind of fragment is aimed at avoiding the power of interpretative unity and expressing multiply variations of manifestations. Postmodernists continue the tradition of chosisme («thing-ist») of French nouveau roman. The difference lies in depicting objective reality which is transformed into a remarkability of a thing existing in simulacrum reality.
