ქალაქის მითოპოეტიკური ხატი ინგლისურენოვან მოდერნისტულ მწერლობაში

The thesis aims to discuss a city as a mythopoetic image in Enhlish-language modernist literature. A city has become the topos of many literary works. However, in Modernism, be it prose or poetry, the urban environment appears not merely as a setting but as a protagonist and a universal, omnipresent phenomenon reminding the reader of the biblical cities of paradigmatic importance - Jerusalem and Babylon. The urban settings of Ulysses by James Joyce, Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, and The Light in August by William Faulkner are considered as paradigmatic models of a city in the thesis. Boundaries of Joyce’s Dublin, Faulkner’s Jefferson, Eliot’s London and unnamed cities of his early poems are abolished and traversed into each literary, mythological, biblical or historical topoi that are recalled in the reader’s mind by recognizing the myriad hidden associations in these works. The thesis demonstrates the composite of artistic means by which the modernist authors transform specific cities into universal ones and create mythopoetic images of them. The consciously constructed multidimensional mythical situations in Ulysses create the omnipresent chronotope that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Joyce’s "mythical method" brings order to chaos and transforms it into the cosmos. This literary process is best expressed by the Joycean term itself - "chaosmos” - that synthesizes Chaos and Cosmos, disorder and order. Simultaneously, Dublin represents a historical and mythopoetic chronotope in Ulysses. Thus, the city seen from two plans coexists and alternates with each other. The thesis also discusses the urban artistic spaces of T. S. Eliot's early and middle-phase poems. The early works - Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night - primarily depict the state of the urbanite exhausted from the dynamics of daily city life. While the cities of the early poems do not manifest the signs of the transformation from the profane into the universal and sacral spatio-temporal continuum, the topos of The Waste Land implies all the cities of the past, present and future - Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Thebes, Carthage, London, Vienna, Munich, and the New Jerusalem. The poem traverses through time and space. Each prophet’s voice represents the cornerstone of perceiving Eliot’s city as a mythopoetic image. The function primarily rests on Tiresias and the Sibyl of Cumae as they are the ones who shed light upon the essential characteristics of the mythopoeic outlook that implies the vision from the moment being to eternity. In Light in August by William Faulkner, the reader finds the coexisted opposing conceptual pairs and the strict segregation between them: South and North, past and present time, different racial categories, fatalism and freedom of choice. By modifying spatial and temporal indicators and creating a multi-layered chronotope, Faulkner allows the reader to look beyond the issues raised in Light in August and to perceive the reconfiguring artistic time-space of the novel. The name of the fictional county - Yoknapatawpha, which is metaphorically interpreted as a river running slowly through flat land, gives the reader an impression from the very beginning that the author creates the chronotope, different from real time and space, in which the regularities of objective reality fail. The author repeatedly uses the concept of avatar. Jefferson, the main townscape of the novel, concentrating each crucial event and gathering multiple avatars epitomized in Faulkner’s characters, also embodies not a specific place, but an avatar of the cities.