Ivan Zhirkin

Vita

Ivan Zhirkin is an independent researcher focusing on contemporary Russian literature and transformation of traditional aesthetic categories in new social, cultural and political contexts, and developing a theory of cringe in art.

Project

My doctoral project aims to examine the transformations of contemporary aesthetic categories and literary markers in a socio-cultural context. I assume that due to the cultural situation of the present time, where everyone can be considered an artist and can appropriate techniques and languages of art, conventional literary techniques that were originally designed as identification marks (apparent signs of literature and criteria for the artistic value) are no longer relevant. The reason these techniques now belong not only to the field of aesthetics and artistic practices but also to everyday life and everyday practices.

The material for my project consists of contemporary Russian novels (howevr, I also plan to use a comparative approach and analyze American and German novels, such as «Infinite Jest» or the «Nobodaddy’s Kinder» trilogy, for example). I categorize these novels into two groups. The first group comprises novels that, in my opinion, are characterized by hyperfictionality, highly fictional narration, and aа corresponding way of organizing discourse. These novels are also politically charged against Putin’s regime. The second group consists of novels that have an unconventional approach to form and structure, and may be considered plotless or anti-fictional (such as autofiction for example or any other documentary-based texts) due to aesthetics of incompleteness, supposedly spontaneous writing, and convergence of literary language with everyday speech.

The main goals of my project are as follows: 1. to identify how artistic expression is evaluated nowadays and what markers indicate that a text possesses literary characteristics; 2. to analyze how authorial discourse or narration is organized in contemporary Russian, German and American novels; 3. to classify the author’s strategies in terms of organizing this discourse: whether the author aims to construct literariness or deconstruct it in an attempt to establish a new author’s position within the text; 4. to define new aesthetic categories and develop a conceptual-categorical apparatus for describing contemporary literature.