მითოპოეტიკური ქრონოტოპი ჯონ დოს პასოსის რომანში მანჰეტენ ტრანსფერი
Mythopoeic Chronotope in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the present paper is to apply the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to the structure of John Dos Passos’s city novel Manhattan Transfer. The paper discusses the forms of fictional representation of New York in the novel and complex time-space interrelations shaping its polycronotopical structure. It also analyzes Dos Passos’ fragmented urban imagery and poetics, innovative writing techniques and devices the writer uses in order to create imaginary urban vision of New York City within the confines of his experimental narrative; it explores the ways in which the novel represents the consciousness of its fictional characters in relation to modern city. Within the context of the twentieth-century, modernist perspective, the city is at once sordid, corrupt, ruinous, terrible, contaminating, and still a place of wonders, magic, marvels, and “reality” in all its most startling and surprising manifestations. The city with its “treelessness”, and its “unnatural, too-human deadness”, with its dangerous “lack of the human in the too-human” became humanity’s new nature, and the conscious substance of modernist novelistic discourse. The reading of the city in local as well as universal terms may be regarded as prototypical and paradigmatic for literary modernism. Being the conscious substance of modernist discourse, the city was understood as real and ‘unreal’, historical and transhistorical at the same time. One finds variant representations of this vision in the Dublin of James Joyce, in the New York of John Dos Passos, and, appropriately modified, in the work of T. S. Eliot etc. Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, an experimental narrative that takes as its subject the quintessential material city of modernism, New York, is paradigmatic example of modernist urban aesthetic philosophy and critical ideology.

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