GENDER AND AGE SUBJECTIVITY OF FOLKLORE TEXT CREATION: TO THE PROBLEM OF GENRE PARAMETERIZATION

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/1728-2659.2022.32.04

Abstract

The article regards gender and age subjectivity as a genre identifier of festive game texts in Ukrainian folklore. Drawing on the previous theoretical studies of the issue, the researchers introduce into folklore discourse little-known data that highlight the prerequisites for the transition of ritual folklore into the realm of cultural game practices. The article objectifies Arnold van Gennep's three-level structure of the rite of passage and studies Ukrainian ritual folklore, which proves that entering a festive event, going through its climax and returning to the profane everyday chronotope regulate a certain ritual marked with a distinct stereotypical behaviour of the actants in ritual practices. In addition, the researchers point out the nature of genre modifications caused by temporal changes in the functional paradigm, desacralized traditional meanings, digression from gender and age standards in relation to text relays, which entails changes of the folklore text. The study reveals the tendency to shift ritual practices, calendar and everyday folklore towards children's game subjectivity as well as the tendency towards the gradual loss of the initial sacral function of the syncretic text, the divergence from gender and age standards of actant in the ritual, the indiscriminate attitude to temporal and spatial parameters of ritual text actualization and simulacrization of the ritual inventory. These features of cultural practices enable the authors conclude that there is a transition from a ritual to a game (ritual → game). The authors extensively use the term 'space of a festive game text in Ukrainian folklore' since they insist on broadening the scope of folklore research as the fundamental branch within the humanities, as a specific dynamic literary system whose constituent categories are subjectivity of a people, a community, an individual as well as content semiotics, transmission of traditional meanings and text narrativity.