Epistoliškumas ir egzilinės tapatybės raiška Alės Rūtos "Laiške jaunystei"

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: "Laiškas jaunystei"; Alė Rūta; Atsiminimai; Autobiografija; Beletristika; Egzilinė tapatybė; Epistoliškumas; Laiškai; Lietuvių išeivijos literatūra; Literatūra; Prisiminimai "Laiškas jaunystei"; Raiška; Tapatybės raiška; „Laiškas jaunystei“; "Letter to Youth"; Alė Rūta; Construction; Construction of identity; Epistolarity; Exile; Exile identity; Fiction; Identity; Letters; Lithuanian literature; Lithuanian literature in exile; Memoir "Letter to Youth"; Memoirs.

ENThis paper seeks to examine the construction of identity in Letter to Youth, fictional memoir by Lithuanian émigré Alė Rūta. The analysis focuses on the relationship between gender and genre in autobiographical writing as defined by Marjanne E. Gooze, Margo Culley, Domna Stanton, and Debora Kaplan, to mention but a few, as well as on the meanings attached to epistolarity in view of its textual, paratextual, and contextual significations. The discussion of epistolarity draws on the theoretical tenets delineated by Janet Gurkin Altman, Katherine Goodman, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, and others. It is situated within the context of women’s literary and autobiographical theory and exile / migration studies. The analysis highlights that the as yet marginalized fictional memoir by a prolific writer Alė Rūta embodies features characteristic of women’s life-writing: “the definition of women’s selfhood as in some way fragmented and as constituting itself in relation to others”, to quote M. E. Gooze. In Letter to Youth, connotations of epistolarity, on the one hand, emphasize the need for relations and dialogue with people left behind in the lost homeland; on the other hand, the lack or impossibility of such a dialogue reveals a spectrum of meanings associated with the personal history of the writer in relation to the political and socio-cultural history of the lost homeland. [From the publication]