Emotiveness of Contemporary Memoir Literature: Case Study on Victoria Belim’s Novel

Abstract

The current research aims at examining the means employed for creating emotivity of contemporary memoir literature and is based on the analysis of the novel “The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir” by Victoria Belim, a contemporary American-Ukrainian writer and journalist. The author was born in Ukraine in a multinational family, left for the USA at the age of fifteen, and returned to Ukraine in 2014, when the war started. In her book Victoria dwells upon the way she has been trying to redefine her identity. She describes her feelings and emotions against a historical background, analyzing the traumatic events which occurred in Ukraine during Soviet times up to present day (e.g. Holodomor, Chornobyl, annexation of the Crimea, events on the Maidan), thus, making the national tragedy her personal one. It accounts for the topicality and novelty of the article. The analysis of the memoir proves that the personal story cannot be deprived of emotiveness which results from the very context of redefining identity during the war in Ukraine; the description of the author’s own feelings and emotions aroused by the events and her memories; the use of emotively charged language and tropes, which add to the expressiveness of the discourse; the presence of different forms of personal pronouns; the employment of sensory and somatic language, etc. The study demonstrates that among the tropes occurring in the memoir, metaphors, similes, epithets and allusions prevail. All those aspects of the memoir’s emotiveness are aimed at affecting the reader, appealing to their feelings and attempting to establish emotional connection for making the story memorable and calling forth the reader’s emotional response. The contentions and examples presented in the study provide preliminary support for the theoretical principles that have been talked about in the literature related to the concept in question.