AESTHETICS OF SHOCKS IN THE CONTEXT OF CURRENT EVERYDAY LIFE

Abstract

Everyday life – regardless of its geographical status – has different dimensions: on the one hand, it is a routine, and on the other hand, it is an attempt to escape from it, to create at least some holiday. In the context of current everyday life, it makes sense to look at its other side: everyday life as stress, affectation of consciousness, etc. It is interesting to observe how the aesthetics of the shock, brought to Ukrainian literature, in particular, by the realities of the 1990s, is modified and filled with new meanings literally before our eyes, and how modern times deform human consciousness, herewith changing the «curve» of surrealism. This is about a phenomenon of the global world – a pandemic as a new experience that has actualized the issue of coexistence and co-responsibility. Experience, preventively studied through fiction and cinema (if «The Plague» by Albert Camus is about the past, then the «The Eyes of Darkness» dystopia by Dean Koontz is about the lethal microorganism «Wuhan 400» in the 1989 edition, which was called «Gorki-400» in the original 1981 version and is a warning fromthe past), now needs a new understanding. After A. Camus’s «The Plague,» one can also appeal to books on the same pandemic theme that have not yet been translated into Ukrainian: for example, Karel Čapek’s play «The White Plague» (1937), «The Steel Spring» by Swedish writer Per Wahlöö (1968), as well as «Blind Faith» dystopia by Ben Elton (2007), where the action takes place in the near future against the background of constant epidemics, and the research focuses on the current topic of vaccination. As a sensitive tool, literature received the reinterpreted theme of ageism for artistic reflection (one can find striking consonance, say, in Japanese literature, in particular in «The Ballad of Narayama» novel by Shichirō Fukazawa), as well as the theme of discrimination on other grounds and social inequality; the theme of a person endowed with power/opportunities and his/her choice to give or not to give the right to life to another; the topic of the area of personal/collective responsibility, boundaries of openness/closedness of societies, as well as the topic of the limit of pragmatism/rationalism, the limits/depth of cynicism. That is, it is about actualizing the presumption of the right to life, the preservation of humanity, which problematizes the other/different content of old, eternal plots of Ukrainian and world literature.