Borys Grinchenko about regulation methods of creative inspiration

The article is a first attempt to tackle Borys Grinchenko’s theoretical paper “The Management of Inspiration” (1893) in the Ukrainian literary studies. The manuscript of Grinchenko’s paper is kept at the Institute of Manuscripts of the National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernadsky. The subject of the research is the writer’s views on the psychology of creativity. The article aims to consider the theoretical views of the Ukrainian philosopher on the problem of inspiration as a special creative venue of the artists, writers or composers, the management of which can affect their productivity. The results of the study enable to detect the influence of both idealistic and positivist-oriented aesthetics in Grinchenko’s theoretical approach to the cultivated creativity. The Ukrainian philosopher is resolute in denying the idea of inspiration as a rapidly passing special state which cannot be managed for example by the writer. Nor does he accept the possibility of productive creativity only in the moments of emotional outburst or transcendence. Grinchenko develops coherently the idea that the ingenious writers systematically experienced inspiration relying on the skill, worked out over the years, to create at a fixed time. In his opinion, the timing for different types of activity allowed those writers to evoke special spirituality at certain hours, when aesthetic performance is the most productive. In his paper, B. Grinchenko insists on the need for each creator to handle the inspiration by means of the skillful management of creative process. The ideas of the Ukrainian philosopher on the possibility of managing writer’s insight keep with the Hegelian thesis of creative inspiration as a natural result of the artist’s hard work. B. Grinchenko regards inspiration as an animating force that can be set in motion by daily routine. Every writer’s moment of the highest revelation proceeds differently; its every stage can be differently time-bound. Yet Borys Grinchenko hopes that in the future the development of literary processes will lead most writers to a disciplined and manageable way of creativity. The ideas of Grinchenko’s paper on the bonding of inspiration and the titanic work of the writer are up-to-date.

TV program “Svit navyvorit” as a project in Ukrainian travel-journalism form

Unlike the last century journalism, the modern one greatly simplifies the communication between the author and his recipient by using the ability to travel and to transmit the information the last user, the recipient, very quickly. Besides technologies, the format chosen by the author of the information message contributes to this. The main objective of the study and the subject of the research is the TV program “Svit navyvorit”. It is a sample of media tourism, which represents distant and little-known cultures and the population of different countries for the Ukrainian recipient in reportage issues. This is popular and relevant for the modern recipient type of media product. This thesis is proved according to the information provided in the study for the number of views by the project in the Internet. The scientific problem is to clarify the format of transmission in today conditions of the widespread phenomenon of genre syncretism. The aim of the article is to define the genre characteristics of “Svit navyvorit”, to find a classification niche for the format. Therefore, the article pays attention to the analysis of features and characteristics of the project, which is manifested in the examples of different series by the program. This is the novelty of the study. With the help of reflections caused by these features, the article attempts to find out what the “Svit navyvorit” is: a travel show, a report, a review, a road story, etc. The format of the program, which has no analogues in the Ukrainian media space, can be defined as an original travel show, a syncretic phenomenon in the genre aspect. This is confirmed by the following features and peculiarities: reports from the scene, eyewitness comments, author’s remarks and direct impressions, communication, drama, eventfulness, contrast, the acquisition of signs of news discourse, lifestyle journalism. The array of seasons and issues of the program “Svit navyvorit” considered in the article combines the features of informativeness, journalism, analytics, art and entertainment. The following general scientific methods are used in the article: comparative, descriptive, comparative-typological, historical-functional, and systemic; method of analysis, synthesis. The prospect of further research is to develop ways to study the paradigm of the format of Ukrainian travel journalism with mandatory rating control based on the number of views.

African American history in Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard”

The article presents interpretations of the poetry collection “Native Guard” of the American writer Natasha Trethewey — the Pulitzer Prize winner (2007), and Poet Laureate (2012–2014). Through the lens of African American and Critical Race studies, Trethewey’s “Native Guard” is analyzed as the artistic Civil War reconstruction which writes the Louisiana Native Guard regiments into national history. Utilizing the wide range of poetic forms in the collections “Domestic Work” (2000), “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002), “Thrall” (2012), — ekphrastic poetry, verse-novellas, epistolary poems, rhymed and free verse sonnets, dramatic monologues, in “Native Guard” (2006) Natasha Trethewey experiments with the classical genres of villanelle (“Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi”), ghazal (“Miscegenation”), pantoum (“Incident”), elegy (“Elegy for the Native Guard”), linear palindrome (“Myth”), pastoral (“Pastoral”), sonnet (the ten poems of the crown sonnet sequence “Native Guard”). Following the African American modernist literary canon, Trethewey transforms the traditional forms, infusing blues into sonnets (“Graveyard Blues”), and experimenting with into blank verse sonnets (“What the Body Can Tell”). In the first part of “Native Guard”, the poet pays homage to her African American mother who was married to a white man in the 1960s when interracial marriage was illegal. The book demonstrates the intersections of private memories of Trethewey’s mother, her childhood and personal encounters with the racial oppression in the American South, and the “poeticized” episodes from the Civil War history presented from the perspective of the freed slave and the soldier of the Native Guard, Nathan Daniels. The core poems devoted to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Louisiana regiments in the Union Army formed in 1862, are the crown sonnet sequence which variably combine the formal features of the European classical sonnet and the African American blues poetics. The ten poems are composed as unrhymed journal entries, dated from 1862 to 1865, and they foreground the reflections of the African American warrior on historical episodes of the Civil War focusing on the Native Guard’s involvement in the military duty. In formal aspects, Trethewey achieves the effect of continuity by “binding” together each sonnet and repeating the final line of the poem at the beginning of the following one in the sequence. Though, the “Native Guard” crown sonnet sequence does not fully comply with the rigid structure of the classical European form, Trethewey’s poetic narrative aims at restoring the role of the African American soldiers in the Civil War and commemorating the Native Guard. The final part of the collection synthesizes the two strains – the personal and the historical, accentuating the racial issues in the American South. Through the experience of a biracial Southerner, and via the polemics with the Fugitives, in her poems Natasha Trethewey displays that the Civil Rights Act has not eliminated racial inequality and racism. Trethewey’s extensive experimentation with literary forms and style opens up the prospects for further investigation of the writer’s artistic methods in her poetry collections, autobiographical prose, and nonfiction.

Ivan Franko’s Perception of Oleksandr Konyskyi: the Processes of Convergence, Divergence and Memorialisation

The article analyzes the reception of Oleksandr Konysky in the literary-critical and journalistic heritage of Ivan Franko. An important point in the study of the relationship between national identity and places of memory is P. Nora’s observation that through common symbols individuals become the basis of a common identity, then the bearers of collective memory no longer need special knowledge to achieve a common identity. The author gives interpretation of such concepts as “iconic figure of the transition period”, “Galicia — Ukrainian Piedmont” and the meaning of specific symbolic place — the Shevchenko Scientific Society, which Franco once drew attention to, glorifying the figure of Konysky, and which still have attractive properties, determining the processes of national identification, the cultural leader of which was Konysky. The subject of the research is tracing the inclusion of the figure of O. Konysky in the Ukrainian cultural and historical canon in the aspect of research on cultural memory and places of memory. The object of analysis is Franko’s literary criticism and journalistic work. The aim of study is to trace the formation of Ukrainophiles generation locus memoria on the example of inscribing the figure of O. Konysky in the Ukrainian cultural and historical canon. This aim involves solving the following tasks: to analyze in detail the figure of Konysky in the literary-critical discourse of Franko; identify the influence of mental and generational factors on their relationships; to find out the ways of memorializing the figure of Konysky in the reception of Franko. As a result of the analysis, using the approaches of biographical, historical-literary, empirical research methods, it was found that despite some contradictions of personal and ideological nature, Franco praised Konysky’s role in building the Ukrainian scientific and cultural space. Franko presented Konysky as an important figure of the transitional period and accentuated the key moments of his activities that had a positive impact on the development of the national idea and on the desire of Ukrainians for the autonomy.

Postcolonial vision of Yaroslav Pavlyuk’s novel “The Garden of Drunk Cherries”

The relevance of the article lies in the study of the problem of the lost generation in modern Ukrainian literature, which remains insufficiently studied in literary criticism. The subject of the research is Yaroslav Pavlyuk’s postmodern novel “The Garden of Drunk Cherries”, to which the methods of postcolonial theory are applied. In the analysis, a literary character with a bifurcated consciousness stands out. This is the type of person in whom the traditional Ukrainian self-consciousness is combined with the Soviet one. The main result of the study is to identify the specifics of Ukrainian national identity in the Soviet Union, which was hidden and not exposed to the public, and Soviet identity became a social mask that people wore so as not to differ from generally accepted social standards. The novelty of the results of the study helps to reveal the social mask, which in Soviet-era Ukraine was the Russian language, which people had to use at the official level. The dramatic conflict between the novel main character, who is the author’s alter ego, and the librarian Oresta, is accompanied by letters from the artist Borys Zhdanyuk and famous directors Andriy Tarkovsky and Sergiy Parajanov, whose emotions and thoughts reveal the real picture of the absence of individual and national freedom in the USSR. Using the examples of people of art, it is shown how the Soviet system destroyed dissent and traumatized creative personalities. The bifurcation of the creative personality in Soviet-era Ukraine often led vulnerable people to their degradation. Censorship, control of dissent, the imposition of socialist realism in art, and the threat of arrest have forced writers, artists, and directors to adapt to the system or become dissidents. The novel depicts characters who do not accept the official ideology, trying to save their private world from state interference. The results of the study have the prospect for further analysis of the work of individual writers and generations who have become a lost force and have not used the creative potential inherent in them.

Social sharing of emotions in social media system: results of the analysis of creepypasta`s comments on Reddit

The relevance of the article is explained by the communicative significance and the functions that the social media system has today. American platform Reddit is not only a platform for world-class communication but also it’s a space for possible implementation of offline interaction models. Currently, both the popularity of Reddit and its influence on the physical world are growing. The object of the study is users’ comments to the highly talked creepypasta “My Sleep Paralysis Demon is Actually A Pretty Chill Guy”. This creepypasta is published in NoSleep community that is the most popular subreddit for sharing horror posts. We use a creepypasta as a convenient material for research due to its communicative nature. This is digital fictional content that is perceived as real (through the internal rules of the NoSleep community) and is not temporal. The article studies the process of social exchange of emotions, their re-experience during the description of the event that caused them. The aim of the study is to find out whether Reddit allows the laws of real social interaction to be transferred to the online space. To solve the problem was used a set of methods, chief among them was the intent analysis. Results. The study has shown that user feedback can be represented by one of three forms (or their certain combination): direct emotional feedback that expresses a certain emotion obtained after reading the creepypasta, commenting on a story that is predominantly a rational expression of thoughts about a story, and a personal experience that is a presentation of information about users commenting on creepypasta. Their calculation showed the existence of common features between offline social sharing of emotions and its digital counterpart. The ratio of different forms of comments depends on the degree of discussion of creepy paste and the specifics of the central topic. Creepypasta is currently actively attracting the attention of scientists around the world, but its formation and formation as a genre of the digital environment is mainly studied. This study focused on the specifics of Creepypasta on Reddit, taking into account the internal rules of the community. For further research, it seems promising to study other genres of the digital environment from the perspective of social sharing of emotions.

Vision of Victorian Ecological Disaster (based on the selected novels by Cindy Spencer Pape)

The problem of nature deterioration in the Anthropocene has become an important art concern, thus leading to analysis of ecological images in the texts of various genres. Our analysis of such imagery in a gaslight romance series is equally topical. The subject of the study is universe of the series of novels by Cindy Spencer Pape which centres around alternative nineteenth century London with highly developed steam engines and corresponding technology. Ecocritical approach is chosen as the research method of the study as the novels have powerful ecological imagery, which requires close analysis. The series covers a number of years, and so the ecological deterioration due to coal overuse can be traced through various London locales, which are described in different time frames, and the comparative reading of these descriptions provides the proof of ecological deterioration. It reveals the consistent ecological discourse within the series, its ties strengthened through steady layering of the images of nature, burdened with progressing pollution. There is social dimension to the issue, as the poorer urban residents are shown to be more effected by this problem due to their jobs, work and living conditions. The paper aims to reveal these numerous aspects of ecological imagery in the texts. The results. Close text analysis of various levels allows us to decipher the multi-layered ecological images and dwell on the message they bear. As the environment degradation takes place in the past, the series allows us to describe its results as facts and compress its progress in time and space within the span of the novels setting. This intensifies the image of the catastrophe, makes it feel more immediate and pressing, thus becoming a powerful plot tool that results in search for solutions of the problem and alleviation of the existing results of coal overuse. This research is the basis of further analysis of ecological imagery in steampunk and gaslight romance as genres, fruitful in that regard.

The mode of theatricality in the work of representatives of “Bu-Ba-Bu” group

The article deals with the phenomenon of theatricalization of the artistic picture of the world in the works of authors-representatives of the group “Bu-Ba-Bu”, (Yuriy Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, Oleksandr Irvanets) who carry out a large-scale renewal of Ukrainian literature by dramatizing reality. That is why the mode of theatricality best shows the basic artistic principles of the group (burlesque-balagan-buffoonery). The relevance of the study is due to the need to analyze the work of representatives of Bu-Ba-Bu in the mode of theatricality. The subject of research is the poetic features, the system of characters and the principles of characterization of the group. The purpose of this article is to identify the ideological identity of the literary work of the group “Bu-Ba-Bu” in terms of revealing the theatrical discourse, which provides the research novelty. Research methods: comparative, comparative-historical and descriptive were used. Results of the research. Yu. Andrukhovych’s great prose and O. Irvanets’ drama are considered in the context of the postmodern concept of “theater society”, which treats various forms of social and cultural life as a kind of performance, as well as in connection with the concept of camp, which is characterized by ironic reflection on mass culture and aestheticization of everyday life. Dimensions of theatricality are realized by groups primarily in the form of carnival, which is a means of overcoming postcolonial trauma and a special space of existence (active involvement of the public in theatrical action, blurring the line between “theater” and real life). Addressing the main tenets of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival revealed the peculiarities of the aesthetics of “crisis periods” in prose and drama of modern authors (opposition to official discourses, total freedom and familiarity, accentuation of the bodily “bottom”). Particular attention is paid to corporeality, which reveals carnival features (grotesqueness, fluidity, dynamism) and at the same time becomes a means of rehabilitating human freedom and vitalistic energy, correlating with postcolonial social context. It is proved that the national originality of artists’ creativity is manifested primarily in the constructive nature of the carnival, which, formally correlated with the rhizome, implicitly affirms the value vertical.

Three contrasting colors in the kaleidoscope of Taras Shevchenko’s diary: “Radiant,” “Hardly-forgettable” and “Liubitsa”

The subject of this paper is Taras Shevchenko’s attitude towards the key personalities – Mykhailo Shchepkin, Nicholas I, and Yekaterina Piunova – as reflected in his diary (also called “The Journal”). The goal is to focus on the author’s characteristics of these people, those that illuminate his own personality too. Although there are a number of studies on the poet’s contacts with them, quite a few important details still remain unclear and unexplained. Another pertinent issue is dubious theses and interpretations, which have become widespread in academic discourse. Thus, the article proposes possible answers to a number of problematic issues in the studies of Shevchenko’s biography. It covers the formation of an almost entirely positive image of Shchepkin, the expressions of the author’s respect and affection to him, that were misunderstood by researchers. The paper also emphasizes Shevchenko’s authorship of the bright expression “neudobozabyvaemyi Tormoz” [hardly-forgettable brake/slowpoke], the one attached to the most negative character of the diary, Tsar Nicholas I. It explains the accuracy of the author’s notes about the monarch’s influence on the architectural development of the cities in the Russian Empire. Particular attention is paid to the prospects of research of those events and plots that, for various reasons, were virtually never mentioned in “The Journal.” I propose an explanation for the fact why Shevchenko did not provide lengthier feedback on his train ride, this new experience for him. The article also talks about the most controversial figure in the diary, namely Piunova. I suggest an alternative reading and etymology for one of the epithets addressed to her, that speaks in favor of the poet’s linguistic competencies and creativity. The emerging result of the research is the clarification of a few episodes of the poet’s biography and his relationship with the mentioned persons. The article demonstrates the productivity of a comprehensive examination of the text both at its macro- and micro-levels. This novel approach combining “distant” and “close” reading can be successfully used for investigation of other Shevchenko contacts and personalities mentioned in his diary.

The formation of the agenda by the periodical editions in 1943 (based on the analysis of the newspapers “Azovskyi Visnyk”, “Bobrynetskyi Holos”, “Buh”, “Vidrodzhennia”)

The current trends in the development of the Ukrainian and world society indicate the need to develop a unified strategy of national information borders protection. The work of the Soviet and German propaganda schools is the basis for the formation of the concept of information protection at different levels of society: from media policy to the development of information coverage and development the main vector in public policy. Today Ukraine is in a state of hybrid warfare and should not only protect its own information space, so the study of the peculiarities of agenda-setting by Pro-German periodical editions on the territory of Ukraine in 1943, when Ukraine was in a state of war, is relevant today. The subject of the study is the features of the agenda by pro-German printed periodical editions in the territory of Ukraine during 1943 (“Bulletin of Azov”, “Bobrynetsky Voice”, “Bug” and “Renaissance”). The purpose of the study was to analyze the peculiarities of the agenda formation in the 1943 by Pro-German printed periodical editions. The research methods are thematic analysis and content analysis. Results. To form a system of the audience’s necessary reactions to certain facts, events, phenomena, analyzed pro-German publications published in Ukraine in 1943, formulated a clear agenda, where the most important (central) role was of reports about the achievements of German troops, and about the economic and cultural development of Germany. The overall narrative was created on the basis of contrast, which allowed not just to actively show the advantages of Germany, but to emphasize on the shortcomings of the administrative activities of the USSR as much as possible. In addition to criticizing the actions of the Soviet authorities, German propaganda used the technique of approaching information in time and space, explaining to the audience that working in Germany is a way to gain new experience, to support the development of Ukrainian culture – a priority for the German leadership, etc. The agenda catered to negativization of the image of the Jews as an ethnicity.