| Abstract [eng] |
Undinė Radzevičiūtė is one of the most prominent authors of contemporary Lithuanian prose. Her work stands out for its distinctive writing style, as critics often point out. Key features include a laconic, ironic narrator, a play on meanings, their fluidity, and a wealth of cultural references. Nevertheless, U. Radzevičiūtė’s authentic writing style in her most recent works has not yet been extensively analyzed in academic circles. This study analyzes the expression of social criticism in U. Radzevičiūtė’s latest works, “Grožio ir blogio biblioteka“ (2020) and “Pavojingi žodžiai“ (2023). By applying a socio-critical methodological approach, the study aims to determine how social criticism is constructed in the author’s latest works, what phenomena become its objects, and through what strategies it is implemented. The study also employs methods of textual analysis and interpretation. In the first chapter, the theoretical section, social criticism is discussed as an interpretive and discursive practice, with intertextuality, irony, the clash of discourses, and the narrator’s position identified as its primary strategies of expression. The interpretive analysis of the novels in the practical part of the study reveals how the construction of social criticism operates differently in both works, despite the use of the same strategies: irony and intertextuality. The analysis of “Grožio ir blogio biblioteka“ presented in the second chapter revealed that the intertextual references embedded in the work significantly contribute to the construction of its meaning during the reading process: they function as text passages that accumulate meaning, leading to the work’s fundamental and foundational ideas – the interplay of moral, aesthetic, and political discourses. Instances of irony, classified into three groups based on their effect, reveal the nature of irony as a multifaceted strategy of social criticism. The interpretive analysis of “Pavojingi žodžiai“ described in the third chapter revealed a somewhat different functioning of these same strategies of social criticism: in this work, intertextuality, unlike in “Grožio ir blogio biblioteka“ functions not as a mechanism for expanding meaning but for diminishing it, revealing the emptiness of cultural intertexts and their largely decorative nature. The narrator’s ironic tone, from the very first sentences, creates instability and ambiguity of meaning and functions as a consistent narrative strategy. An interpretive analysis of the works using a sociocritical approach revealed that social criticism in U. Radzevičiūtė’s works functions as a reading possibility directly conditioned by the reader’s cultural competence. The objects of social criticism are cultural phenomena prevalent in a particular historical period, their significance within a specific discourse, as well as naturalized discourses, the recognition of which directly depends on the reader’s cultural competence – to discern the meaning (or lack thereof) created by intertextuality and to identify instances of irony that destabilize meanings. This work aimed to discuss the dimension of social criticism characteristic of U. Radzevičiūtė’s work by analyzing her most recent works, which has not yet been done in the academic field in Lithuania. This work may be relevant both for further research on U. Radzevičiūtė’s work and in the broader context of studies on contemporary Lithuanian prose. |
