JOYCE’S REDUCTIONIST DISCOURSE AS A PRINCIPLE FOR FORMING REALITY IN V. PELEVIN’S NOVEL “TRANSHUMANISM INC.”

The article examines the patterns of transformation of the idea of personalism in the 20th century, whichled to the evolution of the philosophies of transhumanism and posthumanism in the 20–21 centuries. The purpose ofthe article is to discuss the degree of influence of Joyce’s reductionist discourse on the formation of the reality state inV. Pelevin’s novel “TRANSHUMANISM INC.”. The subject of the study is the change in the conception of the real-ity as imagined the beginning of the 20th century, at the time J. Joyce, into the intracerebral obsession of the person ofthe future, into “Homo overclocked”, as an episode of philosophical mindset, and the impact of this conception on thesubsequent logic of reality in literature. The research problem is to determine the formation of specific transhumanismand posthumanism in the novel by V. Pelevin as a sequence of the literary strategies of J. Joyce. To achieve the goal, wesolve the following tasks: 1) on the case of Joyce’s reception of Shakespeare and Pelevin’s processing of this reception,to show how the problem of the crisis of humanism was perceived not just as a problem of a general cultural decline, butas a way to search for a new paradigm of human, not reducible to the previous humanistic paradigm; 2) on the exampleof Pelevin’s reception of Joyce’s specific reductionist discourse as an experimental one, reducing a person to func-tions, to prove that Joyce introduced an anthropology, in which the human personality is multiple and combined in themodern multiple reality, and that now this concept includes virtual and programmable; 3) to show how Pelevin’s reduc-tion of Joyce’s epiphany, its algorithmization in the framework of postmodern writing strategies, modifies alternativepersonalities into depersonalized subjects and into “Homo overclocked”. The main research methods – comparative, historical-cultural contextualization and discourse analysis, allow us to prove Joyce’s reductionist discourse as a source of forming Pelevin’s post-humanistic perspective of multiple subjectivity.