Медиум прозы. Уильям Гэсс (1924-2017)

Литература двух Америк. 2018. № 4. С. 265–279.

Delazari I.

The article is a brief outline of the literary oeuvre and aesthetic views of William H. Gass, who passed away in December 2017. One of the brightest American prose writers of the 1960–1970s, prolifically active till very recently, Gass is virtually unknown to readers of Russian and insufficiently attended to by the US academia. I derive his relative invisibility from the fact that too much is lost in, and even prior to, translation (whether interlingual or intralingual, in Roman Jakobson’s terms) as well as from Gass’s self-conscious stance as an unrepentant formalist. Gass gave priority to linguistic constructions over content-centered narrations/descriptions not only in theory but also in practice, in fictions as well as in essays. Despite his repute as a radical innovator, Gass held to rather conservative aesthetic beliefs, which, considering their well-articulated nature, do not need the extra medium of academic criticism for reaching out to Gass’s future audiences.

Keywords: эссеистика, American literature, Американская литература XX-XXI вв., постмодернизм в литературе, William H. Gass, American essay, formalist aesthetics, Postmodern American fiction, Уильям Гэсс, формализм в критике и эстетике