4.Publicistic Style

The publicistic style of language became a separate style in the middle of the 18^th century. Unlike other styles, it has two spoken varieties, namely the oratorical substyle and the radio and TV commentary. The other two substyles are the essay (moral, philosophical, literary) and journalistic articles (political, social, economic). The general aim of publicistic style is to influence the public opinion, to convince the reader or the listener that the interpretation given by the writer or the speaker is the only correct one and to cause him to accept the expressed point of view.

Publicistic style is characterized by coherent and logical syntactical structure, with an expanded system of connectives and careful paragraphing. Its emotional appeal is achieved by the use of words with the emotive meaning but the stylistic devices are not fresh or genuine. The individual element is not very evident. Publicistic style is also characterized by the brevity of expression, sometimes it becomes a leading feature.

The oratorical style is the oral subdivision of the publicistic style. Direct contact with the listeners permits a combination of the syntactical, lexical and phonetic peculiarities of both the written and spoken varieties of language. The typical features of this style are: direct address to the audience; sometimes contractions; the use of colloquial words. The SDs employed in the oratorical style are determined by the conditions of communication. As the audience rely only on memory, the speaker often resorts to repetitions to enable his listeners to follow him and to retain the main points of his speech. The speaker often use simile and metaphor, but these are generally traditional, because genuine SDs may be difficult to grasp.

The essay is rather a series of personal and witty comments than a finished argument or a conclusive examination of the matter. The most characteristic language features of the essay are: brevity of expression; the use of the first person singular; a rather expanded use of connectives; the abundant use of emotive words; the use of similes and sustained metaphors.

The language of journalistic articles is defined by the character of newspaper, magazine, as well as subjects chosen. Literary reviews stand closer to essays.

1. Postmodernism as a trend in lit

The meaning of this concept is vague, not clear, “after modernism”.

Postmodernism is based on total irony. In this case we can compare P. with BuBaBu : Bufoonery /clowning; Bluster/noisy protest; Burlesque/comic satirical imitation.

This group is described as the first widence, the first sign.(Юрій Андрухович, Володимир Неборак, Олександр Ірвінець)

Characteristic features: 1) Irony; 2) Game with the reader; 3) Simulacrum (signs without reference – depict our real life); 4) Intertextuality; 5) Palimpsest (you can not define smth. clearly); 6) Hyporeciptivity (текстом може бути все – гіперрецептивність); 7) non-selection ( mixing of elements to create a state of chaos; 8) death of the author and the death of the reader (“Hazard Glossary”); 9) double coding (Пєр Мінар); 10) uncertainty, indeterminacy: not either or, but both…and , what is it about? Where is the plot? Is it a fairy tale or not (“Hazard Glossary”); 11) there is nothing saint..12) text in text; 13)playfulness; 14) black humor. Postmodern authors were certainly not the first to use irony and humor in their writing, but for many postmodern authors, these became the hallmarks of their style. Postmodern authors will often treat very serious subjects—World War II, the Cold War, conspiracy theories—from a position of distance and disconnect, and will choose to depict their histories ironically and humorously.

Pastiche(підробка, імітація)

Many postmodern authors combined, or “pasted” elements of previous genres and styles of literature to create a new narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their contemporaries. Thomas Pynchon, one of the most important postmodern authors, uses elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction, songs, pop culture references, and well-known, obscure, and fictional history.

Intertextuality An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary works. The intertextuality of certain works of postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier, attempts to comment on the situation in which both literature and society found themselves in the second half of the 20th century: living, working, and creating on the backs of those that had come before.

Metafiction

Many postmodern authors feature metafiction in their writing, which, essentially, is writing about writing, an attempt to make the reader aware of its ficitionality, and, sometimes, the presence of the author. Authors sometimes use this technique to allow for flagrant shifts in narrative, impossible jumps in time, or to maintain emotional distance as a narrator.

Technoculture and hyperreality

In his essay of the same name, Frederic Jameson called postmodernism the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” According to his logic, society has moved beyond capitalism into the information age, in which we are constantly bombarded with advertisements, videos, and product placement. Many postmodern authors reflect this in their work by inventing products that mirror actual advertisements, or by placing their characters in situations in which they cannot escape technology. 2. Fowles 

But exposing the gap between the date of the story and the date of its composition inevitably reveals not just the artificiality of historical fiction, but the artificiality of all fiction…. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel as much about novel writing as about the past. There is a word for this kind of fiction, “Metafiction”

Mantissa Mantissa has been the one novel of Fowles which has probably provoked the smallest amount of critical discussion. Instead, I will concentrate on the one aspect that is prominent in Mantissa, which is the problematizing of the complicity of the male writer in the perpetuation of certain images of women. These images, as it were, only serve the male writer’s ends, and this is exactly what the heroine in Mantissa, Erato, tries to demonstrate.

This theme is closely linked to the theme of self-referentiality in the novel. To get to know just what is happening in Mantissa, the reader has to do some detective work during the first part, in which the protagonist, Miles Green, is portrayed lying in a hospital, suffering a ’power cut’ in Dr Delfie’s words. This in turn has provoked a loss of memory, evidenced by the fact that Miles Green tells Erato during their discussion on the principles of writing, and this is true for Mantissa as well. One hint to this fact can be found in the first part, at the end of which Nurse Cory enters the room and presents Green with a text he has written, which, in fact, begins with very first words of the novel we have started to read.