The development of modern literary criticism is associated with a change in
traditional approaches to the interpretation of certain components of the content
and form of a literary work. One of these aspects is the literary image-character,
which is a fundamental category of literary studies that defines the nature, form,
and functions of literary and artistic creativity. The concept of literary portraiture
deserves special attention, as it was previously mainly considered in a narrow
sense, as a reflection of the character’s appearance. Researchers use it in a broader
sense, considering a literary porter as a set of external and internal features that
allow to form a holistic view of the character.
Today, there is a lack of systematic scientific research on this issue, and of
particular interest is the problem of literary portraiture in contemporary literature,
which functions within the artistic system of postmodernism, which affects the
artistic and ideological content of works in general and literary portraiture in
particular.
One of the representatives of the contemporary Ukrainian literary process is
Volodymyr Danylenko, whose work synthesizes postmodern and neorealist trends,
demonstrates the experimental nature of genre, style, and imagery, as well as the
establishment of complex artistic and aesthetic forms. V. Danylenko’s prose
demonstrates a combination of traditions and innovation, the use of established
structures and the desire for creative experiments. Despite the existence of a
number of studies devoted to various aspects of V. Danylenko’s literary work, it
has been established that the poetics of portraiture in the artist’s prose has not yet
become the subject of a separate study, and the provisions formulated in the
analyzed scientific studies need to be clarified in accordance with the content and
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formal features of the writer’s works that have been published recently and need to
be interpreted by literary critics.
The introduction defines the object, subject, purpose and tasks in accordance
with the topic of the dissertation research, substantiates the relevance of the
scientific work, provides information on the testing and implementation of the
results of the dissertation, outlines the author’s contribution in the works published
in co-authorship, and indicates the structure and scope of the work.
The first chapter of the dissertation formulates the theoretical foundations of
the study of the poetics of artistic portraiture in the works of V. Danylenko in the
context of postmodern correlations in the portrayal of women in contemporary
Ukrainian prose, in particular, the problem of portraiture in literary studies is
considered, postmodern transformations in the portrayal of the character are
characterized: from external to internal, from pictorial to expressive.
It has been found that the problem of literary portraiture is studied by
scholars in the context of the following issues: the essence of portraiture in a
literary work, its functions, classification of literary portraits, their structural and
semantic components, features of portraiture in various forms of art – painting,
literature, photography, music.
The views of literary critics on the essence and functions of portraiture in a
work of fiction are systematized, in particular, it is stated that it is most often seen
as a reflection of the inner world of the hero, an indicator of his psychological
states, or as one of the means of creating a character’s image. It is found that the
concept under study can be used in a narrow (as a description of the character’s
appearance) and broad (as everything that contributes to the formation of a holistic
image of the character, reproduces his or her essence) meanings.
It is stated that today there is no single generally accepted typology of
literary portraits; they are classified on the basis of the following criteria: the
number of characters described; the ratio of external and internal; completeness of
description; structure; degree of detail of the depicted object, etc.
It is found that significant transformations in the portrayal of a person
occurred in the postmodern era, primarily due to the crisis of ideologies,
anthropological skepticism, depersonalization of a person in society, a sense of
chaos, disconnection, alienation of the world, the idea of «death of the author», etc.
And in the Ukrainian version of postmodernism, it is also associated with attempts
to revise the moral and ethical guidelines and values of the Soviet era, the denial of
the principles of socialist realism, and the resuscitation of national and religious
consciousness.
