CARNIVAL STRUCTURES
CARNIVAL STRUCTURES

Summary/Abstract: In the paper the authors deals with Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s poetic matrix, moreover with the books that have made him famous in the world of art literature, namely The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets. In the contemporary American literature the name of Doctorow stands for a writer who is neither a radical postmodern experimenter, nor the writer of modernist charge. This writer equally gives his attention to narrative issues that occupy contemporary American and world literature, especially to its postmodernist wing; but on the other hand, he gives even more attention to the valuation of American society, its myths, history and ideology, and that is exactly what has been exploited in modernist literature. This orientation towards the dungeon of language, and critical inspection of common places in American spiritual map, has earned him the unanimous recognition by both critics and literary historians, and by the literary audience as well. Doctorow has understood perfectly well that the functions of literature and the place in a system of spiritual activity have changed, that literature has lost a privileged place in the system of language, that in the modern world fictional and nonfictional no longer exist, but only a narrative, what can or cannot be told. But the narrative is still the essential dimension of human existence and survival in the world, and not only that, the moral and aesthetic values are still inseparable from each other.

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