DOI: 10.7256/2454-0749.2021.12.37204

Abstract: The object of this research is the essay “The Vision of Mirza” by Joseph Addison. The relevance of studying J. Addison's essay is substantiated by undue attention to his works in the Russian literary studies, as well as the need for tracing the dynamics in the genre of vision in the Age of Enlightenment. The subject of this research is the title and epigraph as parts of the work that determine its structure and artistic distinctness. Analysis is conducted on the images of the viewer, visionary hero, and his guide, chronotope of the essay and allusive links. The essay is based on the combination of systemic-structural, comparative-historical, and hermeneutic methods. The novelty consists in the fact that the comprehensive examination of the role of the title ensemble within the structure of the essay allows reconstructing the link of the essay with the traditions of the medieval genre of vision manifested in the traditional topic and consistent motifs, imagery system, space and time arrangement, and dialogical structure of the text. The author provides interpretation to the allusive links between J. Addison's essay and Greco-Roman mythology, epic poem “The Aeneid” by Virgil, and psalms from the New Testament, and “The Voyage of St. Brendan”. It is established that the dialogue set by the epigraph passes through the entire plotline of the essay and reveal the characters of its participants. The extensively presented Christian theme alongside the images from ancient mythology and Virgil’s texts are essential for the author to express the enlightening program.

DOI: 10.7256/2454-0749.2019.2.29795

Abstract: The subject of the study is the connections between the early prose of the modernist writer and the novel Gulliver's Travels. The relevance of the topic is due to S. Beckett's attention to English Enlightenment and the work of D. Swift. The aim of the study is to examine the current perceptions of early S. Beckett's art in the aspect of the artistic "dialogue" analysis. Convergence between the novels of S. Beckett's novel More Pricks Than Kicks and the novel by D. Swift of Gulliver's Travels appears at the level of subtext and form harmony in the plots of the stories about Gulliver and Belaqua.  Gulliver's travel, covering a long way from Lilliput to New Holland and return to England, accompanied by transformations in the image of the hero from "man of the mountain" to "despicable Yahoos", is projected in different facets to Belaqua Shua's "circle of the earth". The study of literary and philosophical parallels in S. Beckett's novel is based on a combination of the system-structural, comparative-historical methods, and hermeneutics. The novelty of the research is due to the following facts: interpretation of the story matches, the category of the movement, the dichotomy of body and soul, ties with the world in the minds of the characters allows to actualize innovative, aesthetic tradition of novelistic prose of the eighteenth century and uncover experimentalist modernist novel in Samuel Beckett's works. The results of the study can be used in the course of studying the history of foreign literature and a special course on the history of the modernist novel.