Concepts of authenticity in metamodern theories and literary practices

INTRODUCTION. The concept of authenticity is analyzed as one of the key concepts in the theoretical and literary practices of metamodernism, which is related to the increased attention of modern literary criticism and humanities to the categories of subjectivity, affect, and reality. The aim of the study is to conceptually reconstruct the metamodern understanding of authenticity and test its analytical productivity using the material of recent Russian prose. MATERIALS AND METHODS. The study draws on core metamodernist discussions of authenticity and on two novellas: Ilya Kocherigin’s “Zapasnyy vykhod” (Emergency Exit) and Alla Gorbunova’s “Vasha zhestyanka slomalas” (Your Tin Can Broke). Methodologically, it combines conceptual reconstruction with hermeneutic and narrative analysis. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Authenticity is shown to operate in two registers: “authenticity of the subject” – as the affectively mediated formation of subjectivity in contact with the other; and “authenticity of the object” – as an aspect of intersubjective reality, actualized in the modes of shared experience. In the texts of contemporary literature, the realization of these models is revealed both at the level of poetics and at the level of thematics. In I. Kochergin’s story, authenticity is presented as a movement from bookish mediation to lived experience of an event; for A. Gorbunova, it is presented as the ultimate experience of uncertainty, intensifying the demand for semantic and ethical integrity. CONCLUSION. It is concluded that metamodern models of authenticity have high explanatory power in interpreting recent Russian prose: they allow us to relate the playful poetics to the existential issues of the text, indicating a tendency toward a shift from postmodern distance to the restoration of contact with reality and the reader.