Essayistic Akvilina Cicėnaitė’s novel: The English Dictionary

Abstract

The article discusses a popular novel “Anglų kalbos žodynas" (The English Dictionary, 2022, 2023) by Akvilina Cicėnaitė. The novel’s experiential writing in the first person is chosen as the main argument of the analysis as it embodies the novel poeticism of the contemporary Lithuanian prose – essayism. It features a reflective narration from the ‘me’ position based on the critical self-reflection and objective observation from two timelines. The novel’s essayist character is examined by employing the essayism phenomenon analysis by the contemporary Russian-American literary scholar Mikhail Epstein. In particular, the non-plot narrative forms characteristic to Cicėnaitė’s novel are considered, such as association, trope, essema, metamorphosis, and metabole. This kind of criticism in the novel serves to give sense to the experience of turning the other culture to one’s own. The article debates that Cicėnaitė manages to successfully accumulate the tendencies of the short Lithuanian essay to the novel genre and summarize the experience of the novel phenomenon that has been forming since the reestablishment of Lithuania’s independence. The essayist phenomenon speaks of a greater scale cultural trend that gives meaning to the new subjectivity, and a re-signification of collective stereotypes in the time of modernism and postmodernism.