Transitive literary discourse in the modern novel

Abstract

Abst ract. The novels of W. G. Sebald, Vladimir Vertlib, Alexei Makushinsky, and many other contemporary writers around the world challenge both readers and researchers. These authors tend to have a (trans)migrant background and establish their texts at the intersection of many cultural codes, languages, and sign systems. Literary translingualism and multimodality from particular stylistic techniques are becoming dominant writing strategies for an entire corpus of outstanding fictional texts for which previous analytical approaches become irrelevant. This is new literature that needs to be addressed and discussed in a new way. This article hypothesizes that in such novels, a new – transitive – discursive practice is taking shape. The article presents the concept of transitive literary discourse and reveals some of its common features based on the three translingual novels. These are “Austerlitz” (2001) by W. G. Sebald (Germany – UK), “Way Stations” (1999) by Vladimir Vertlib (Russia – Austria), and “Steamship to Argentina” (2014) by Alexei Makushinsky (Russia – Germany). The authors of the article combine the methods of discourse analysis, historical and theoretical poetics. Mikhail Bakhtin’s works on the aesthetics of verbal creativity provide the methodological basis of the study. The intellectual toolkit of the transnational and visual methodological turns is also engaged. The study reflects a set of topical issues of modern literary theory aimed at understanding the language of literature and art at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (the era of globalization). Transitive literary texts actualize the problem of the language of description, methodology and analysis technique of a new literary discourse.