Andrii Bezrukov’s research while affiliated with Ukrainian State University of Chemical Technology and other places

Collective memory is actualised when a social group or a nation endeavours to reconstruct significant historical events giving them a certain interpretation. Historical exploration of the sources of a new world order and its fragility involves imperialist narratives being the causes of some geopolitical conflicts. All the great empires inevitably lose their power and status, but some former empires still feel the phantom pains of their former greatness, which may have unforeseen historical consequences. Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons (2022), covers a long period of time to deliver a powerful meditation on history and humanity through one man’s life across generations and historical (un)doings. The article focuses on the literary representation of some historical contexts and attempts at resisting collective amnesia, in order to illustrate how a blatant disregard for the painful lessons of history invites the occurrence of new cruelties of imperialist ideology.

Reflecting conspiracy theories in contemporary fiction actualises conspiratorial thinking as a specific sociocultural phenomenon and narrative. Four symptomatic novels – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia, and Stephen King’s The Institute – have been analysed from a conspiratorial perspective to illuminate the most efficient ways of shaping the human perception of reality. For this purpose, the following conspiracy elements have been delineated to be the basis of the novels’ poetics: otherness, propaganda, and mistrust. They affect the authors’ strategies of storytelling in the books written in the era of the end of truth. Following an interdisciplinary approach that primarily includes the method of narrative construction and semiotic analysis, the article focuses on the conspiracy elements for plotting the selected novels and explicates conspiracy narratives for manifesting the paradoxical ethics of truth as fiction. Conceptualising this idea in the sociocultural context confers to such a kind of literature a new ethical dimension.

Today humanity is going through a period of great upheavals and rapid changes in every sphere of life, including the environment, that inevitably lead to general destabilisation and disruptions. In the latest novel by Rumaan Alam, apocalyptic Leave the World Behind (2020), a crisis appears to reshape our closest bonds and forge new ones. This story of an invisible terror deals with cataclysmic but mysterious events that shut down the communication networks we over-rely on, and sees an almost overwhelming sense of uncertainty, panic and increasing anxiety. Isolated in the remote holiday house with the Vermont stone kitchen tops and night-lit swimming pool, a couple of New Yorkers and their teenage children are looking forward to taking a rest from the routines of city life when catastrophe strikes. In addition to the major theme of the threat of human extinction, Leave the World Behind explores the relationship between class and race and the complexities of parenthood and solitude during an unspecified disaster. Those issues are included in the context of the global problem of anthropogenic impacts on the environment. At the same time, Alam demonstrates how habituation to the ongoing crises in the modern world, including social-ecological transformations, affects the understanding of a severe situation people are facing and ways to prevent it: they have increasing tolerance for the absurd. The suspenseful, provocative and prescient book, Leave the World Behind, captures the generalised panic of 2020, the year of a global outbreak of coronavirus. As a kind of end-of-the-world fiction, the novel is full of moments of exquisite recognition and reappraising of our attitudes the article discusses.

The re-actualisation of the stylistic device of repetition as an element of textuality and means of expression in a work of fiction, which is manifested in its power to impact readers, their linguistic consciousness, emotional evaluation and culture of perception in a specific manner, meets the research purpose. The article focuses primarily on lexical repetition which is a means of rhythmising words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Rumaan Alamʼs most recent novel Leave the World Behind (2020) which has been selected for analysis is full of repetitions to give expression to the text. This is explicated through the stylistic functions of repetition which actively participate in creating literary images and semantic compatibility, ensuring narrative integrity and lexical coherence. The research methodology is primarily based on a combination of the methods of hermeneutic, linguistic and stylistic, and semantic analysis. In the article, lexical repetition is proposed to be a structural means of representation and embodiment of the concept of intensification and actualisation. Since the compositional organisation of the novel is found to be linked to its semantic structure, repetition as a textual element accentuates certain paragraph features across the book, making them semantically consistent, thus forming the semantic structure of the novel. Lexical repetition serves as a crucial element of an author’s writing style contributing to the representation of authorial intent.

Transformations in the perception of horror by modern readers have provoked an increased tolerance for cruelty and death. This increase challenges authors to use special means of emotional arousal in order to appeal to contemporary audiences. One of Stephen King’s most recent books, The Institute (2019), is replete with such special means. The novel deals with unspeakable terror and centres on a group of psychic kids kidnapped and placed in brutal conditions to serve the dark purposes of powerful men. This article explores King’s ways of expressing horror by affecting universal human experiences, emotions, and feelings. It applies an interdisciplinary perspective based on psychological and hermeneutic approaches to argue that in the non-otherworldly and non-monster horror The Institute , King involves a combination of vocabulary inventions, syntactic transformations, letter emphases, and refined literary devices to create a terrifying atmosphere. These means are explicated in the article to argue that the violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms is, in many ways, more shocking and frightening than traditional bloody images. They help King remodel a dark realm of gripping horror, where fear arises primarily out of a sense of the distorted world order, and enable the writer to critique social institutions for their approval of horrendous harm.

The subject of the research is the artistic interpretation of social and political problems in Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte (2019). This work is a postmodern reinterpretation of Cervantes’s story about the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, which tackles a number of pressing issues, faced by American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, from opioid addiction and migration to the environmental crisis and cyber-spies. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe those social and political triggers that, on the one hand, define today’s agenda of the American post-truth society, and on the other hand, appear to be kind of tags of the relevance and priority of the issues raised. Explication of the strategies of literary representation of such problems in the work of fiction reveals their relationship with the author’s worldview. The application of the methods of hermeneutic, intertextual, cultural, semantic, and linguistic-stylistic analyses enables us to study the author’s intentions in the literary space with an emphasis on the most topical concerns of contemporary issues. The literary forms representing the post-truth narratives in Rushdie’s novel are designed to expose the most troublesome issues in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. The article examines the interpretation of such problems as the influence of mass media products, racism, and gender inequality, as well as some issues of language, ageism, and psychological pressure on children. The results of the study. The concept of post-truth, which penetrates fiction from public discourse to become a key means of explaining the author’s intentions and creating narratives of hyperreality, in Quichotte, appears as the prism through which all events, phenomena, and meanings are interpreted. Having become the main form of artistic vision, hyperreality appears in postmodern fiction to transform the contemporary literary landscape. This post-truth environment helps Rushdie see and analyse in detail the most crucial problems of American, or, in general, world society. They are manifested at all levels and in the actions of the characters, and the situations that happen to them, as well as in the author’s comments.

The article re-actualises genderlect as one of the key points of male-female differentiation and a relevant object in the humanities, not merely from the perspective of gender studies but linguistic and literary ones. Self-stereotypes in the speech of one or another gender may be considered the result of the complex interaction of collective identity and the subconscious. The excerpts from the selected novels by Salman Rushdie, Jennifer Crusie, Lisa Kleypas, Aleksandar Hemon, Zadie Smith and Candace Bushnell have provided a wide range of patterns of expressing self-stereotypes in the dimension of ‘women about women’. To emphasise the multicultural nature of genderlect self-stereotypes, the writers of different ethnic affiliations are represented. The article also classifies the criteria of self-stereotype polarisation in characters’ speech to explicate the strategies of women’s verbal behaviour. These criteria include marital status, maternal experience, professional activity, ageism and harassment. The impact of gender on verbal behaviour, observed in real life and adapted to fiction through literary representation, is manifested in communication stereotypes. This serves to illuminate the most representative speech self-stereotypes, which make certain images or ideas easier to interpret. The application of an interdisciplinary approach with a set of appropriate methods to theorising and practising genderlect reveals its role as a significant tool for reconstructing a linguistic worldview and contextualises both positive and negative self-stereotypes for the expressive evaluation of speech in fictional discourse.

Dystopia while deconstructing utopian ideas generates a special type of identity as a consequence of a deviation from anthropocentric principles, crises of national and cultural worldviews, and changes in manifestations of social shifting in the posthumanist world. The article has focused on four symptomatic dystopian texts – George Orwell’s Nineteen Forty-Eight, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ahmed K. Towfik’s Utopia, and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte – to explicate the dichotomous nature of the opposition of identity vs society in the posthumanist transformations. Those conditions are considered a cause of the mutation of dystopian identity that troubles its anthropological bases and modes of existence. To reconstruct the posthumanist context and its influence on the dystopian identities in the selected novels, this study has exploited a mixture of the following methods: intertextual, cultural, and genre ones; phenomenological approach; hermeneutic interpretation; conceptualisation, etc. The novelty of the study emanates from the very attempt to interpret the writers’ names of the AGEs which are represented in the books as a background of storytelling and a lens through which the posthumanist space is transformed from a dystopian perspective.

The article reconsiders the sociolinguistic basis of gender-specific vocabulary representation within the context of linguistic identity’s sociocultural transformations. The comprehension of language interaction is postulated as an indispensable precondition for understanding linguistic identity to affect their sociocultural development. It is also connected with the influence of sociocultural transformations on the features of cognitive processes. The study primarily follows selection, descriptive, and synthesis methods. The strategies of gender-specific vocabulary usage as a rate of male and female’s differentiation are essential in the study of linguistic identity. It is important in the sense that the gender category determines the psychological and social development of individuals, especially their verbal behaviour. Gender-specific vocabulary circulation in the context of the evolution of linguistic identity is the result of such sociocultural processes as a focus on gender-sensitive communication patterns, avoidance of language gender imbalance, and social dynamics. Gender-specific vocabulary may serve as a modifier of an individual’s verbal behaviour and speech internalisation processes. Such kinds of lexis may act as tools for constructing the linguistic view of the world and defining the language ontologisation options. In the context of the last years’ social and cultural changes, the development of linguistic identity explicates the idea of verbal behaviour and sociocultural processes’ interdependence. Linguistic identity has been revealed as a representative of identity in general to reflect social and cultural levels of existence which are shown through the language. Keywords: speaker, communication, social parity, verbalisation, gender, behavioural pattern.