The atmosphere of school education in the American outback as a premise of Gothic poetics of Stephen King’s prose

Abstract

Until recently the mass-literature (pop-art) was not considered to be a serious factor of aesthetic development. In popular fiction Stephen King takes a special place. Speaking about the topical issues of modern society (the Presidential election in the “Dead Zone”, school bulling in “Carrie”, artificial intelligence in “Trucks”, etc.) he uses an entertaining intrigue and creates multi-layered characters. Both western and Russsian critics underline King’s ability to combine the ideological conceptuality and breath-taking plot of his stories.

The article discloses the fundamentals of aesthetics system of the writer, covered in the autobiographical notes “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. The accent is given to his call for studying the art of story-telling, plot development, deep disclosing the nature of the character, inner truth etc., from the classics of world literature. Regarding the novel “Carrie”, one of the best example of King’s art, we notice that puritanical New England mentality didn’t lose its rigoristic frames in twentieth century. The main character of the story becomes the victim of her mother’s fanatism and the adolescent violence of her classmates. Depicting one of the middle schools of New England (Maine), King shows different forms of aggression, verbal humiliation, bullying. Cruelty and coarseness are moved to the communicative field. In the episodes with the violence to Carrie, the writer renders crowd psychology and so-called mental epidemic described by Carl Jung. Based on the M. Foucault’s assumption “blood is a reality in a symbolic sense” the article shows King’s addressing to ancient archetype and beliefs, connected with maturity of a girl. The special attention is given to the point-of-view device both in ideological and spacetime depicting of the reality. It is pointed out that the novel becomes the way of recognition of real dangers to morality and humanity.