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Abstract:

The article considers the main vectors of the cultural and academic reflexion of the prefix “neo.” The author describes the notions of the cultural retrospection and of the retrospective movements in world literature, reveals their invariant features (recurrent character, high variability, controversiality, syntheticism, tendency to produce the third-order movements, self-reflexivity, etc.). The paper discusses the possibility of not only specifically historical but also typological perception of the retrospective movements that, while basing on the binary oppositions, often shift towards the ternary model of the Hegelian type which includes thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The state of culture abundantly producing the retrospective movements is discussed, particularly in relation to the ideas of the “end of history” (F. Fukuyama), the “random cannibalization” of historical forms and styles (F. Jameson), the “invalidation” of language (H. Lefebvre), the cultural recontextualization (L. Hutcheon), the “culturology of prefixes” (S. Zenkin). The author also describes the status of the issue in the academic literature and proposes several possible ways of perceiving the “retrospective dimension” of the cultural theory based on various existing concepts of the literary process: filiational (T.S. Eliot, H. Bloom), whose driving force is a complicated interaction between tradition and the individual talent; systematic dynamic concept (V. Shklovsky) involving the whole artistic systems; receptive aesthetics (J.R. Jauss) where the history of literature is seen as the history of changing and competing horizons of expectations; and historical poetics (S. Broytman) with its idea of the “great time.”

Keywords: cultural retrospection, retrospective movements, literary process, prefix “neo”, binary and ternary models, renaissance, topoi.