Aesthetic Cognition of Postmodern: the Genre as the Game

The article is devoted to the genre in the postmodern paradigm, which determines the vector of aesthetic cognition both in literary criticism and in the reader's perception. The game was actualized in the literature and art of the second half of the 20th century both at the thematic and at the structural-compositional level, which in general becomes the basis for the formation of play poetics and the strengthening of genre syncretism in postmodernism. The relevance of the article is determined by the need to identify those factors that determine the peculiarities of the world perception and attitude to the world, inherent in postmodern authors, and determine the parameters of aesthetic cognition. A deviation from the canon of the genre becomes aesthetically significant for postmodernism: genre features that do not have a high degree of static are able to activate reflexive-interpretive activity in relation to the work or the work of the writer as a whole. The purpose of the article is to describe the specifics of postmodern aesthetic cognition from the standpoint of understanding the genre as a game in it, using the example of the implementation of elements of play poetics in Neil Gaiman's literary tale «Stardust» (1997). Using the background knowledge of the reader, updating cultural codes, postmodernity contributes to the process of updating genre forms in the world literary process, and play, as a leading principle of creative activity in the postmodern paradigm, appears as an activity carried out according to rules that do not limit the author's creative potential and allow full to present his intentions in the work. Thus, Neil Gaiman in his novel «Stardust» consistently and organically deconstructs all genre features of a fairy tale, which, nevertheless, clarifies its philosophical problematics and allows multidimensional expansion of the horizons of aesthetic cognition.