Linguistic means of demythologization in the novel «The Children of the Dead» by Elfriede Jelinek

Abstract

The article deals the typological tools used by the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek to describe the mythologized reality. The research material is the novel Children of the Dead (1997), marked by the most daring language experiments. The purpose of the study is to identify the specifics of the language practice of Jelinek for deconstructing modern myths of public consciousness. Its destructive method is based on the theoretical constructions of R. Barth and J. Baudrillard. Jelinek translates the procedure of demystification of consumer consciousness undertaken by French philosophers into the linguistic plane of the postmodern deconstruction method. The language in the novel appears as a carrier of the traumatic memory of the Nazi past, which continues to exist in the hyperreality of the present. The deconstruction of mythological structures in the novel is carried out in bold language experiments, in the element of language games, in new unexpected contexts. The most frequent stylistic means of Jelinek are metabola, conceptual metaphors, grotesque, oxymoron, occasionalisms, realized metaphors, metalanguage play with text and other types of tropes. All this is aimed in the text of the novel at the super-task of demythologization. Jelinek replaces emotional catharsis, as in the perception of high culture, with a more effective critical catharsis, which allows the reader to take a sobering position in relation to demystified reality.