Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: A Possible Application of Philosophy in the Study of Recent American Fiction

Albee's "The American Dream" (1961), one can observe the authors' immense effort to extricate the reader from the state of passive innocence that leads to the ignorance one has to be responsible for; and draw through the disturbing awareness up to the point where there is no certainty anymore just the philosophical state of estrangement, where everything is relative and one has to find and create meaning for his/herself alone. Even the expression 'Absurd Creation' is paradoxical, contains the element of humor, reality, i.e. in its very self, as Abádi-Nagy says, the novels are written exactly like reality exists: there is no causality, form is abstract, accidentality has a dominant role and appearance becomes the essence in most cases (

Válság és komikum 397). In this situation humor can cover the serious existential themes without pretension. This comic vein has found a breeding ground in the genre of fiction with slightly different functions of the author, reader, text and viewpoint character. The change in their relationship has deeper roots than a mere innovation in the narrative technique: the radical changes in the world in late twentieth century and further on the entropic factors culminating in the 1960s in American society has drown a change in the Weltschauung of both philosophers and artists. Pragmatism could serve as a standpoint, a help to understand and tolerate reality, but also to defend the conformist ideas driving to chaos and entropy, too. Pragmatism with its content ideas could help the artists understand the necessity of accepting the plurality and relativity of all things. The latter is the reason why I feel the impact of the Many Worlds Theory applied by William James a pragmatist philosopher (James 63-80), as strong in literature as I have described it earlier. Probably it also formed their concept of truth and existence as well as the creation of a new concept of the literary establishment. Nevertheless, without the influence of other philosophical ideas, such as French Existentialism, Heidegger or Wittgenstein, Postmodernism could not have such a strong theoretical foundation. I believe that this effect is double fold: on the one hand, writers directly transferred them into/through the artifacts. On the other hand, literary theory has got deeply involved in philosophical questions as well. Oswald Spengler's idea of the Decline of the West due to exhausting its cultural possibilities is revoked in Heidegger's philosophy and it is also nicely translated into the language of 51