“Sincere” artist within postmodernity (case study of Charles Bukowski's short prose)

The creative practices of a postmodernist artist are characterized by the postmodern project’s resistance to modernist ideas about art, in particular, about an artist’s activity. Therefore, the gesture of a modernist artist, being expressed in the rejection of everyday external reality in favor of transcendental spheres, is perceived by postmodernity as one of the possible strategies of self-representation, eventually bringing it back to the context determined by social conventions. In addition to this, postmodernity rethinks the category of sincerity. The development of the media forces the postmodernist artist to construct a media image, thus the same referent is perceived by the audience in two different ways: through the media and through the artistic text. The aim of the study is to identify poetological devices in the short stories by the American writer Charles Bukowski, which are helpful for expressing the authenticity and veracity of the narrative, contributing to the enhancement of the reality effect. The relevance of the work lies in the insufficient study of Bukowski’s small prose and the need to consider the category of sincerity in the context of postmodernity. As a result of the analysis of Bukowski’s stories, it is concluded that the transformation of one’s experience into a literary work becomes a way for a postmodernist artist to reveal that modernity’s sincerity is artificial due to its nature of artistic device and gesture.