The genesis of the literary mainstream in the context of the functioning of socialist realism and postmodernism

Abstract

The article analyzes the mainstream as a set of acceptable official cultural standards that actively function in the literary and artistic practices of socialist realism and postmodernism.  The peculiarities of the development of the literary process in Ukraine in the context of legalization of the socialist realist canon, which exists autonomously within the cultural and historical space and leaves an ideological and aesthetic imprint on the formation and formation of literature, displaces previous and existing literary experience.  With the help of historical-literary and comparative methods of analysis of literary trends, markers of mainstream literary texts and correlation with the literary overground of socialist-realist and postmodern works are understood.  The result of the study is the erroneous identification of the texts of the socialist period with the phenomenon of literary mainstream within mass culture, as such works are not oriented to democratic values, but marked with ideological stamps and intended to impose on the reader the position of the ruling elite.  Deformation also occurs within the category of realism, because the socialist-realist text does not reproduce existence in objective manifestations, but predicts it as a happy life of the people programmed in the future, provided that the latter observes the rules and requirements established by the state.  Texts of the socialist realism distort the two-component structure of the literary mainstream: the reader's interest and his expectations of literary texts were not a catalyst for the development of Soviet literature, which had a purely pragmatic orientation.  Within the literature-component, the recipients dealt with a clearly defined range of issues raised in the texts, among which a prominent place - the formation of a new type of citizen capable of serving the formation of the native state and its priorities.  Instead, they form the literary mainstream texts of the postmodern era, which are characterized by openness, triviality, appeal to the ordinary, accessibility, the use of archetypal images and ideas, a mixture of the incompatible into one, and so on.