SCHIZOTYPAL NARRATIVE AS A WAY OF CONSTRUCTING FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN A. KOZLOVA’S NOVEL F20

• Main Author: Breeva Tatyana Nikolaevna
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural State Pedagogical University 2019-02-01
• Series: Филологический класс
• Subjects: modern women’s prose; russian literature; russian writers; novels; schizophrenic discourse; narrative; female subjectivity; physicality; traumatic experience
• Online Access: https://filclass.ru/en/archive/2019/4-58/schizotypal-narrative-as-a-way-of-constructing-female-subjectivity-in-a-kozlova-s-novel-f20

The modern literary criticism, when analyzing the texts of female prose, distinguishes narrative strategies as one of the key structural and semantic components of the created works of art. Traditionally for women’s prose at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. narrative strategies are distinguished by stylistic sophistication, variability and variety (for example, novels by L. Ulitskaya, D. Rubina, M. Stepnova, etc.). In contrast to this tradition, A. Kozlova’s novel F20 (2017) is ascetic, rude and anti-aesthetic. Such a style setting can be explained by the primacy of schizophrenic discourse in the novel, or rather, the schizotypical narrative, which forms a gender-labeled picture of the world. The basis of the schizotypical narrative of the novel F20 is its communicative potential, which makes it possible to restore the integrity of the female body. At the same time, the schizotypical narrative narrows to the limits of narration by the heroine of herself, while the surrounding society becomes the sphere of manifestation of the cultural unconscious. As a result, the authors of the study come to the conclusion that in the novel by A. Kozlova, the form of the manifestation of a schizotypic narrative is Julia’s narrative, which is both the history of the disease (both her own and her sisters) and the history of growing up. Moreover, the history of the disease, becoming the language of expression of the growing process, has its own semantic content. In addition, a schizotypical narrative is seen as a form of representation of the female language constructing female subjectivity. Traditionally for feminist representations, the body becomes a way of gaining a female language. This provokes the narrator to search for a language for describing schizophrenia: two versions of her description appear – medical and mystical. The first option is consistently presented with a list of drugs recommended for the treatment of this disease. The mystical version is directly associated with the image of Sergei, who dominates in the psychotic states of Julia and Anyutik. However, the genuine acquisition of the language of the “female body” as a way to overcome the schizotypical narrative becomes possible for the narrator only by experiencing and resolving female trauma, the form of manifestation of which becomes the narrator’s sexual experience