Oksana Zabuzhko's Self-forewords in the Paradigm of Journalism

The purpose of the article is to reveal the genre and style features of Oksana Zabuzhko’s self-forewords in the paradigm of literary journalism.

The appeal to such methods as biographical, historical, comparative, axiological, and discursive gave an opportunity to multifacetedly reveal the subject of research, in particular, to prove the affiliation of literary criticism to journalism, to point out the processes of modification in the modern genre of self-preface and its involvement in non-fiction literature, to comment socially communicative and spiritual potential of the works of the writer belonging to this genre, to comprehend their civic pathos in proportion to social events in Ukraine at the beginning of the 21st century, to highlight the manifestation of the author individual style, taking into account her innovation.

Oksana Zabuzhko’s self-forewords vividly represent the journalism of the globalization era, aimed at mass consciousness intellectualization. They implement the journalistic motives of historical memory, woman’s attitudes toward the war, and the artist’s functions in the shocking period of national history. Genre and style features of self-prefaces (motivation for writing the work to which the preface is written, including analysis of socio-political factors of its origin with the involvement in the facts of the writer’s biography; civic pathos and lyrical confession of the narrative; literary-critical commentary on one’s own work, marked by postmodern writing; the philosophical intensity of subjective assessments of current issues of the late 20th – early 21st century, the priority of the author-publicist image as an intellectual, politician, woman, patriot) allow us to assert their belonging to namely literary journalism and not to the analytical genre of journalism or studies of literature.

Phenomena of intertextuality and fragments of Oksana Zabuzhko’s biography, falling into the figurative lexical field of the narrative of her prefaces, perform a plot-forming function: they materialize the interweaving of space-time layers, become the factual image, and building material of the original composition fastening all its elements, as well as the personification of the role of a woman in the Ukrainian society and a symbol of the civic resilience of the writer concerning the issues of the prestige of the Ukrainian people and its culture.

Oksana Zabuzhko’s forewords demonstrate the peculiarities of literary journalism, which, by our definition, is a specific type of masterful and national-world journalism, characterized by genre diffusion, state-building content, filigree mechanism of pragmatics, complicated intertextuality, active integration into the aesthetic system of literary creativity of the author.