LETTERS_cfp_Bulgaria.docx

Aspasia, 2019

Milena Kirova, ed., Mara Belcheva: Poezia (Mara Belcheva: Poetry), Volume 1, Sofia: Kibea, 2018, 268 pp., BGN 17 (paperback), ISBN 978-954-474-728-2.Milena Kirova, ed., Mara Belcheva: Proza i prevodi (Mara Belcheva: Prose and translations), Volume 2, Sofia: Kibea, 2018, 350 pp., BGN 19 (paperback), ISBN 978-954-474-729-9.Vanya Georgieva, Ekaterina Karavelova—Lora Karavelova: Kulturnoistoricheskiat sjuzhet “maiki-dushteri” v bulgarski context (Ekaterina Karavelova—Lora Karavelova: The cultural-historical subject “mothers-and-daughters” in the Bulgarian context), Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2017, 543 pp., BGN 25 (paperback), ISBN 978-619-01-0073-7.

Slavic Review, 2018

Looking at Bulgarian society and cultural life of the first half of the 1900s, this study scrutinizes a common belief in the high public esteem reserved for poets and writers in eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the creators of literature (and the national arts in general) occupied a precarious position in a society without a sustainable cultural market. The predicament of Bulgarian writers, however, was that of many European literati in early 1900s competing for readers’ attention with a rising mass culture. Placing Bulgarian writers in a broader interwar framework, this article explores the various non-literary strategies they pursued in affirming the public value of national literature. In the process, it suggests that the lore of “the writer as a national hero” was the deliberate work of social actors seeking to correct an unsatisfying reality and not an expression of an organic relationship between nation and writers (and intellectuals more broadly).

The paper sketches the general picture of literature written far from home in the late 20 th and early 21 st century. Noting three waves of Bulgarian writers living abroad and the dynamics of their work, the author focuses on the reception of this kind of literature at home – demonized and mythologized, rejected and perceived as forbidden fruit, and political analysis. The language used in such literature is also scrutinized from the point of view of the exoticism of a Bulgarian text published in a foreign context, or the legitimization of a text originally published in a foreign language. The author illustrates his observation with the reception of the work of a number of Bulgarian émigré writers.

2018

The article presents the genre model of the letter to the press based on a comparative study of 140 Polish and English readers’ letters. The analysis encompasses structural, pragmatic, semantic and stylistic matters. The discussed texts are assigned their place within the letter genre, grouped into different types depending on their propositional content and further characterized as marked by a repertoire of genre signals. Additionally, the controversy over their genre membership (editorials vs. letters) is resolved and they are recognized as genuine research material, notwithstanding some degree of editorial bias involved in the publication process.

Presentation of my book project at the 10th Bulgarian-American conference ''Beyond the borders'', which took place in Sofia on June 27-29, 2016.

2020

Preliminary Theoretical Remarks For nearly two decades, we have witnessed a new condition of Bulgarian literature (although it is hardly restricted to Bulgarian literature alone), which could be defined as "the globalization of the national literary field." And it is not a matter of what we see on the surface, i.e. that many Bulgarians, some of them living abroad, write their fiction or poetry in foreign languages, mainly in English. In fact, the overall mode of operation of the field in question has changed. Pierre Bourdieu defines the literary field as a network of reciprocal positionings and distinctions between writer's roles, practices, and styles-in other words, as a shared space where each writer's standing obtains its specific meaning in a network of entangled relationships, distinctions, positions, and oppositions. 1 What he is referring to is a self-sufficient and isolated, immanent space, a French or even a "Parisian" writers' community, that produces differential social meanings and roles internally. However, during the previous longue durée of Bulgarian literature, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the factors, which created such a network of relationships, were not limited to concrete writers' roles and the differential topography of literary groups. Key normative elements of the social imagination, which transcended the isolated self-sufficiency of the field and all of its internal relationships, were crucial in the production of meaning. Back then, all Bulgarian literary roles and positions indispensably found their meaning not only in internal mutual juxtapositions and differentiations but in an inevitable relation to external cultural norms and models.

East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 2020

This article reconstructs the history of the Bulgarian section of the International PEN. The PEN (initially standing for Poet, Essayists and Novelists) remains a global society of writers, founded in London in 1921, with the intent of promoting international understanding and higher social standing for writers and literature. The Bulgarian PEN was formed in 1926 by authors seeking to break the international isolation of Bulgaria, a former member of the Central Powers. The International PEN enabled Bulgarian literati to engage as non-state agents in cultural diplomacy of their own and to expand their intellectual and professional networks. Based on a variety of sources, the article analyzes the hopes, real limitations, and actual achievements of the Bulgarian PEN until its closing in 1941. It uses the organization’s interwar history to examine the workings in eastern Europe of what Akira Iriye called “cultural internationalism.” It demonstrates that while global literary and cultural...

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1990

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2017

The aim of this paper is to instigate the development of theoretical discourse on contemporary travel writing about the Balkans, especially the works created since the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The problematization of this discourse is timely, even more so when the unique heritage of the Balkans has to harmonize with that of the rest of Europe. Travel writing vibrantly mirrors this process, but the critical tools through which it is currently read come primarily from postcolonial theory and necessitate revisiting. Although postcolonialism has facilitated the popularity of the genre in academia, it does not adequately satisfy the discussion of an increasingly more complex cultural phenomenon that is that of the Balkans, which cannot be simplistically framed in terms of the 'Other'. While the Balkans can still be viewed as the 'Other' in connection to Europe, as a political and economic union, they cannot be dismissed as such from a wider cultural, geographical and historical perspective. To prove our point, we will list examples of incongruences and suggest possible shifts in perspective. Apart from this, as a polygeneric form, the travelogue demands a multidisciplinary, contextual and comparative approach, while our immediate support will be contemporary travel writing criticism about the Balkans. Theoretical background Opening his Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Tim Youngs argues that '[t]ravel writing […] is the most socially important of all literary genres' 1 and concludes that its 'ethical importance […] is stronger than ever' , 2 because '[i]t throws light on how we define ourselves and how we identify others'. 3 This 'we' becomes the most interesting subject when it travels with an intentional mind and later recollects and narrates the experience with a purpose. Yet, to our aim, it receives additional importance when it finds itself on contemporary Balkan roads, when it reveals a pronounced discomfort with the prevailing metonymy 'the Balkans' , and especially when it fights, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, within the narrative frames and strategies determined by postcolonial criticism. Recently produced postcolonial reading of travel writing about the Balkans forces serious limitations on both travellers and critics who speak from a world in which the exoticity of localities-once supportive of the quest for the 'other'-has disintegrated. Although their

Aspasia, 2015

Bulgarian Women Writers and the Resistance of the Literary Canon Review Essay by Valentina Mitkova Albena Vacheva, V periferiata na kanona. Bulgarskite pisatelki prez purvata polovina na 20 vek (In the periphery of the canon. Bulgarian women writers in the fi rst half of the twentieth century), Sofi a: