The dynamics of autobiographism of the american modernist novel: from Henry Miller to Jack Kerouac

The study is devoted to the evolution of autobiographism in the American modernist novel of the 1930s-1950s. The article briefly describes the genre features of literary autobiographies and discusses the problem of ambiguous interpretation of the term ‘autobiographism’ in contemporary literary criticism. The study is based on Naum Leiderman’s theory of genre constructed on the idea that any genre is a certain combination of its structural units, i. e., ‘genre carriers’, these primarily including subject-oriented, spatialtemporal, and speech organization. Autobiographism, considered in the article as a principle of the author’s portrayal of his own life in a work of fiction, manifests itself precisely in the genre carriers, transforming them in a certain way. Following this, we define the autobiographical novel as a genre variety possessing the following features: the author aims to portray his life in dynamics of his personal relationships with the exterior world; the author’s life experience serves as the material; the leading principle of depiction is autobiographism. Based on a comparative analysis of the features of autobiographism in modernist novels, the paper traces the tendency, typical of modernist writers in the 1930s-50s, to abandon the ideas of elitism and textcentricity of the 1920s literature, and shows their increasing interest in their own writer’s individuality as well as the ways of expressing it in a literary work. The autobiographical novel, ideologically oriented toward the representation of the author’s ‘I’, became a genre in which this trend found expression through the complication of the forms of autobiographism, reflecting the structural, stylistic, and ideological features of modernist autobiographies. The material under research are the autobiographical novels Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.