“SINCERE” ARTIST WITHIIN THE POSTMODERNITY (BASED ON C. BUKOWSKI’S SHORT PROSE)

The creative practices of a postmodernist artist are characterized by the postmodern project’s resistanceto modernist ideas about art, in particular, about an artist’s activity. Therefore, the gesture of a modernist artist, beingexpressed in the rejection of everyday, external reality in favor of transcendental spheres, is perceived by postmoder-nity as one of the possible strategies of self-representation, eventually bringing it back to the context, determined bysocial conventions. In addition to this, postmodernity rethinks the category of sincerity. The development of the mediaforces the postmodernist artist to construct a media image, thus the same referent is perceived by the audience in twodifferent ways: through the media and through the artistic text. The aim of the study is to identify poetic devices in theshort stories by the American writer Charles Bukowski, which are helpful for expressing the authenticity and veracityof the narrative, contributing to the enhancement of the reality effect. The relevance of the work lies in the insufficientstudy of Bukowski’s small prose and the need to consider the category of sincerity in the context of postmodernity. As a result of the analysis of Bukowski’s stories, it is concluded that the transformation of one’s experience into a literary work becomes a way for a postmodernist artist to reveal that modernity’s sincerity is artificial due to its nature of artistic device and gesture.