Dissertation in the form of a monograph is devoted to writerʼs essay in Ukrainian literature of the end of XX-beginning of XXI centurу. As a result of the systematic analysis of a significant amount of essayistic texts in contemporary Ukrainian literature, it is suggested to define essay as a genre, meta-genre and discursive practice all at the same time. The intentions of essay as a genre are aimed at a particular – personal – way of presenting the subject of speech. The meta-genre nature of the essay is conditioned by the variability of the means of fictional-reflective modeling of the world, going beyond only one type of creativity. For the first time, the comprehension of essay as a discursive practice as an artistically and socioculturally conditioned connection of the processes of creation and distribution of certain kinds of subjective-reflexive activity during a certain period of existence in literature is offered. Essay as a discursive practice requires special methods of reading it. Some of the basic ones include the technique of existential (in-depth, slow) reading, which involves a step-by-step, thoughtful decoding of the authorʼs meanings, focused primarily on the reader-intellectual, and associative reading, which was tested on the basis of modern Ukrainian literary essays, by paying attention to the keywords that grow into word sequences.
The monograph also offers a comprehension of writerʼs essay of the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century in the mental-narrative discourse. It is proven that mentative, as a reference to thinking itself in one’s speech practice, same way as the statements that generate mental events (changes in perception of the world) in reader’s mind, is present in the majority of works in modern Ukrainian literature, which we qualify as essayistic. For essay as a discursive practice, we are offered the concept of exoginarrator – a narrator who becomes a thinker, a mediator in an essayistic discourse.
Another section of research is devoted to the topologically-reflexive features of writerʼs essay in contemporary Ukrainian literature, different types of creativity are systematized based on the authorʼs self-identification with a certain topos, which implies a certain clot of thought generated by the author’s consciousness in a form of mentative formation, artistic adoption of topos with words.
All these and other analyzed aspects made it possible to make conclusions about the literary essay of the end XX – beginning of XXI century as an exceptional part of modern literary process and as a stable cultural and artistic phenomenon of art in general. Considering the analysis of its nature, traditions, origins, context-organizational factors, variety of thematic and reflexive expanses, there is every reason to claim that contemporary writerʼs essay is a holistic phenomenon of modern Ukrainian literature, which develops according to its internal principles and situations as a result of current cultural era. It is entirely self-contained multifaceted creativity work, marked by polyphonic artistic initiatives that are gaining momentum.
The dissertation in the form of a monograph substantiates why, how, with the help of what factors, essays today have taken a leading position among other genres and types of literary creativity. Essay is a personal, associative and emotional work, fundamentally non-systematic, actualized by author’s subjectivity and clearly multifaceted versatility of narration, but it has won the attention of both contemporary writers and readers in the realities of transitional era, experienced by Ukrainian culture.
