Dystopia while deconstructing utopian ideas generates a special type of identity as a consequence of a deviation from anthropocentric principles, crises of national and cultural worldviews, and changes in manifestations of social shifting in the posthumanist world. The article has focused on four symptomatic dystopian texts – George Orwell’s Nineteen Forty-Eight, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ahmed K. Towfik’s Utopia, and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte – to explicate the dichotomous nature of the opposition of identity vs society in the posthumanist transformations. Those conditions are considered a cause of the mutation of dystopian identity that troubles its anthropological bases and modes of existence. To reconstruct the posthumanist context and its influence on the dystopian identities in the selected novels, this study has exploited a mixture of the following methods: intertextual, cultural, and genre ones; phenomenological approach; hermeneutic interpretation; conceptualisation, etc. The novelty of the study emanates from the very attempt to interpret the writers’ names of the AGEs which are represented in the books as a background of storytelling and a lens through which the posthumanist space is transformed from a dystopian perspective.

The article focuses on the strategies of reconstructing communicative space between the author and reader as well as forecasting the emotional impact on the reader through transforming textual reality. The emotiogenic characteristics of fictional discourse provide the emotional perception of literary texts since emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Such a perception is made possible by the identification, comprehension, and interpretation of the emotionally significant textual components of different types. The authors of the article have classified them as the following: graphical and visual, punctuation, and semantic-stylistic ones. These means, found in the postmodern novels by Salman Rushdie, Tahereh Mafi, Marina Lewycka, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alexandar Hemon, and Stephen King, have been analysed to explicate the character of the phenomenon of emotiogenic fictional narratives. The emotiogenic means in the selected novels are exploited by the writers of different ethnic affiliations that can be resulted from their multicultural experience. The superimposition of some means is explained by their semantic relationship. The article tests a hypothesis that the cognitive architecture of the emotiogenic means is determined by an emotional situation reflected in a literary text that appears to be a special code through which readers interpret their emotional and evaluative meanings. The indicators of the text’s emotionality occur to be signs of the textual representation of emotional knowledge. This study contributes to the investigation of the emotiogenic means of creating communicative space which are considered those discursive expressive elements that affect the perception of textual reality.

The subject of the research is the artistic interpretation of social and political problems in Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte (2019). This work is a postmodern reinterpretation of Cervantes’s story about the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, which tackles a number of pressing issues, faced by American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, from opioid addiction and migration to the environmental crisis and cyber-spies. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe those social and political triggers that, on the one hand, define today’s agenda of the American post-truth society, and on the other hand, appear to be kind of tags of the relevance and priority of the issues raised. Explication of the strategies of literary representation of such problems in the work of fiction reveals their relationship with the author’s worldview. The application of the methods of hermeneutic, intertextual, cultural, semantic, and linguistic-stylistic analyses enables us to study the author’s intentions in the literary space with an emphasis on the most topical concerns of contemporary issues. The literary forms representing the post-truth narratives in Rushdie’s novel are designed to expose the most troublesome issues in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. The article examines the interpretation of such problems as the influence of mass media products, racism, and gender inequality, as well as some issues of language, ageism, and psychological pressure on children. The results of the study. The concept of post-truth, which penetrates fiction from public discourse to become a key means of explaining the author’s intentions and creating narratives of hyperreality, in Quichotte, appears as the prism through which all events, phenomena, and meanings are interpreted. Having become the main form of artistic vision, hyperreality appears in postmodern fiction to transform the contemporary literary landscape. This post-truth environment helps Rushdie see and analyse in detail the most crucial problems of American, or, in general, world society. They are manifested at all levels and in the actions of the characters, and the situations that happen to them, as well as in the author’s comments.

The article discusses two symptomatic texts that are imbricated within the utopian/dystopian ambience: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. The style and structure of the selected novels are revealed at the level of the chronotope and aimed at clarifying the correlation of genre-forming components within the triad of a ‘person – civilisation – society’. This paper tests a hypothesis that the discursive representation of these components in a narrative structure is realised through colliding utopian and dystopian worlds. Problematising this idea in fiction reveals how the tension between the diametrically opposed worlds promotes critical scrutiny of both to draw attention to the most pressing social problems facing humanity: the role of ordinary people in society, impact of mass media on public opinion, dissolution of morals, social disparity, drug addiction, etc. The study primarily follows a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of utopian/dystopian worldviews in the literary dimension. The dichotomy of utopia/dystopia manifests in the novels through the overt conflict of different patterns of life, mentalities, and cultures. Analysing the ways of a literary embodiment of this conflict in Bradbury’s and Towfik’s books explicates how creating a new reality from utopian/dystopian perspectives alters consciousness and promotes a completely different paradigm of existence.

The article re-actualises genderlect as one of the key points of male-female differentiation and a  relevant object in the humanities, not merely from the perspective of gender studies but linguistic and literary ones. Self-stereotypes in the speech of one or another gender may be considered the result of the complex interaction of collective identity and the subconscious. The excerpts from the selected novels by Salman Rushdie, Jennifer Crusie, Lisa Kleypas, Aleksandar Hemon, Zadie Smith and Candace Bushnell have provided a wide range of patterns of expressing self-stereotypes in the dimension of ‘women about women’. To emphasise the multicultural nature of genderlect self-stereotypes, the writers of different ethnic affiliations are represented. The article also classifies the criteria of self-stereotype polarisation in characters’ speech to explicate the strategies of women’s verbal behaviour. These criteria include marital status, maternal experience, professional activity, ageism and harassment. The impact of gender on verbal behaviour, observed in real life and adapted to fiction through literary representation, is manifested in communication stereotypes. This serves to illuminate the most representative speech self-stereotypes, which make certain images or ideas easier to interpret. The application of an interdisciplinary approach with a set of appropriate methods to theorising and practising genderlect reveals its role as a significant tool for reconstructing a linguistic worldview and contextualises both positive and negative self-stereotypes for the expressive evaluation of speech in fictional discourse.