Literary Time Travel Devices in the Epic Novel «The Dark Tower» by Stephen King

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the literary time travel devices in the epic novel “The Dark Tower” by Stephen King, as an element of revealing the theme of apocalypse. Literary time travel devices and their use in the work are analysed, and parallels are drawn between the main motive of the work, the destruction of the world, and the temporal forms implemented in the work. In the horror genre, the Gothic chronotope underwent transformative and mutational changes, leaving behind only the generalized meaning of a certain continuum and the importance of the separation the space of the unfolding of the story from the general literary world of the work, in order to create a conditional vacuum. of Since its inception, the horror genre has been constantly undergoing transformations under the influence of the era in which it is changing. According to J. F. Lyotard, the transition from modernism to postmodernism begins at the end of the 50s of the 20th century, asserting that there is a reorientation in human consciousness from materialism to informatization. Postmodernism creates in the worldview of a person an orientation associated with such units as anxiety, irrationality and powerlessness. This is primarily related to the loss of faith in the urgent values of the era of modernism, the idea of reason, progress, and the emancipation of the individual. In horror literature, there is a modification phenomenon of merging two genres from different types of literature, in particular horror and fantasy. The hyperreality, that we outline, is a symbiotic metagenre technique that develops by combining elements of the horror genre and the dark fantasy metagenre. For example, most of S. King’s works have common citations, mentions of characters, events, locations, mentions, etc., as an element of creating a general “superchronotope” of the author’s literary world, thus creating for the reader a massive literary world as close as possible to the real one, but with idiosyncratic, genre elements. In this way, the motif of relentless apocalypse develops in the canvas of S. King’s works, which is most powerfully concentrated in the epic novel “The Dark Tower”. The results of this research may in the future constitute a component of intelligence on mass literature.