author:
Maya Trynyak (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4981-8535)
Relevance of the research. The relevance of this study stems from the fact that the experience of war, as lived by modern people, brings about profound changes in the cultural, linguistic, and existential dimensions of existence, which, in turn, gives rise to new forms of literary writing and calls for philosophical reflection. In the context of Ukrainian society, war emerges not merely as a historical event, but as a means of constituting an individual’s thought, memory, and self-reflection. Contemporary Ukrainian and European philosophers and writers, by representing images of war, open up the possibility of analytically grasping traumatic experience, revealing the specificity of human existence in extreme conditions while simultaneously forming new linguistic models for its description.
Problem statement. In this article, the author explores the conceptual understanding of literary representations of war. War is presented as a specific, representative depiction of a traumatic experience, and the time to which participants in military conflicts refer is marked by destruction.
Analysis of recent research and publications. In literature and philosophy, the issue of how images of war are portrayed in paradigmatic forms is explored in the works of Paul Fassel, Michael Rothberg, and Katie Karut, whose research takes an existential-traumatic approach. Dominic LaCapra, who distinguishes between the experience of war trauma and the reflection on this issue, and Lynn Henley point to the literary representation of images of war as a means of remembrance.
Research task. To analyze the concept of war as an ontological and spatial rupture; to examine the issue of silence and apophaticism in the representation of wartime experience; to explore the temporal dimension of war through the concept of unfinished time; to define the ethical and aesthetic boundaries of literary depictions of war; to conduct a hermeneutic analysis of contemporary Ukrainian philosophical prose (in particular, the works of Bohdan Zhuravlia and Yevhen Herasymenko).
Main material presentation.. The article highlights that philosophical prose—specifically, a literary text—serves as a vehicle for spatial thinking, where the traumatic experience of war introduces new forms of thought, since literary depictions of war have practical reflections and applications in the literary works of contemporary Ukrainian writers. War, as an extreme situation of human existence, introduces destructive shifts in the perception of the categories of time and the subjective perception of world space, which involves the concept of existential emptiness. Contemporary philosophical prose largely attempts to recreate images of war through literary creation, since this subject matter should not be lacking in the representation of war imagery.
Conclusions. Based on the analysis conducted in this study, it has been established that literary images of war in contemporary philosophical prose transcend the boundaries of traditional representations of events and acquire the status of an ontological phenomenon. Literary images of war become an event of thought in which philosophical analysis and artistic reflection are combined, forming a new language for describing the extreme states of human existence and the human condition.
Keywords: literary depictions of war, philosophical prose, traumatic experience, unfinished time, memory, language, existence, subject, contemporary Ukrainian literature, war.
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