WRITERʼS ESEISTICS IN THE LITERARY PROCESS OF MODERNITY, OR ON THE REASONS FOR THE POPULARITY OF THE GENRE

Abstract

The article tells about the reasons for the popularity of writer’s essay in the modern lit- erary process. The key point is that the contemporary writer is an artist opening to various, often polar, creative practices. Therefore, she can be simultaneously involved in different discourses, and often equally effective. For this reason, there are so many Ukrainian writ-ers today who are at the same time engaged in scientific, literary-critical, editorial, and public activity, without favoring any of these types of creativity. Essays become a unifying link for all these processes, because artists who have literary-critical, scientific, public, ed- itorial experience etc. often turn to it. The article focuses on writer’s essay as an indicator of multiliteracy, an open set of writing processes. External factors in literature (increased interest in the personality, interest in the figure of the writer as an individual, the reader’s demand for non-standard forms of artistic word, convergence of literature and media) and internal factors in literature (change of generation of writers, interest in the statement from traditional poetics to the poetics of artistic modality, the crisis of great epic forms) are ana- lyzed as factors that contribute to essay popularity. A special emphasis is placed on modern variations of Montaigne work’s variations in the era of Web 2.0.