Summary
Aleksander Flaker: Prose in jeans
Biblioteka Razlog
Equipment: Mihajlo Arsovski
The subject of Plaker's study in this book is a prose formation typical of recent Central European and Eastern European literature, which the author calls "prose in jeans" according to the American term jeans-prose (further on in the JP presentation). It is a type of literature that the author briefly defines as "prose in which a young storyteller appears who builds his own distinctive style based on the spoken language of the city's youth and challenges traditional and existing social and cultural structures". In an unusually broad-based comparative review, working simultaneously in the fields of several national literatures, Flaker studied the works of twenty-nine JP writers. For the paradigm of the prose type in question, Flaker takes the novelJ. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). In it, "the structural features on which this type rests are most clearly exposed," the author maintains, "the opposition of the world of young people and the world of adults, a new type of storyteller on which this opposition is built, the approach of the storyteller's language to oral spontaneous speech, the introduction of youth jargon into the storytelling with a distinctly urban, civilization style, an ironic-parodistic attitude towards the perceived values of cultural structures, the tendency to mythologize youth nonconformism". Depending on the specific situation in certain national literatures, JP writers also accept other role models, among whom Flaker mentions J. J. Osborne, J. Wain, A. Sillitoe, J. Kerouac, F. Sagan.
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