CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE BETWEEN ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND EASTERN THEODICY

Abstract

The essential theme elaborated by Venko Andonovski in his latest literary- theoretical, literary-critical and cultural book entitles as “Dostoevsky and McDonalds” (Publishing house TRI, Skopje, 2019) is a devaluation of the novel’s aesthetic and literary-artistic value and the literature in general, in terms of modern globalized and globalizing Western world literature. The oxymoronic-ironic i.e. syntagmatic construction coming from the novel’s title (Dostoevsky and McDonalds) is an allusion of the diametrically opposed creative strategies of the Western European (Western) contemporary literature (predominantly bestseller) on one hand, and the Eastern European (Eastern) contemporary literature on the other. This opposition of the two “literary worlds” (one anthropocentric and the other theocentric) is directly and specifically elaborated in the first chapter of the novel (What is bestseller), yet the studies in the remaining four chapters of this novel as a dominant theme contain that divergence between Eastern literature with high aesthetic achievements and the fabricated (patterned) “fast-food” bestseller of the Western literary world.

Keywords: Venko Andonovski, bestseller, artiness, world literature, Dostoevsky, McDonalds, globalization.