This project is designed to study the Bulgarian public scandals in the 1992–2019 period related to education in history and literature. After the end of communist rule, education had to undergo institutional depoliticization until the development of new curricula; such were elaborated in 1999–2000, and then in 2016. The five major scandals to be studied under this project erupted consecutively in three stages and bound, in a different way, history and literature together into a common field of national mythology where public opinion formulated its notions of “truth” and “manipulation”, values, national ideals, and so on. Those symptomatic scandals have not been studied in their own right to date, and, besides, public opinion surveys on education issues are a recent phenomenon not only in Bulgaria.
Using interdisciplinary research methods and main concepts such as public space of history, conceptual history, national mythology, and text figuratives to analyse the public language of the scandals in question, the project aims to reconstruct the plots of those scandals with a view to their concrete political contexts; to observe the viewpoints of the institutions involved and the public reactions, and the specific points of their intersections and correspondence; to identify their impact on institutional policies; to take into consideration their long-term resonance in the statements of public opinion in Bulgaria.
The project is an attempt to problematize the political and scientific routes of one of the most prominent figures among the Bulgarian intelligentsia in the period of communist rule – Nikolai Genchev (1931-2000). The published commemorative volumes (2002, 2012), memoirs, documentaries (2011) as well as Iv. Znepolski research (2016) do not cancel the growing need to speak about N. Genchev's heritage critically and analytically, with the tools and horizons of modern historiographical analysis. That is why in this project I will try to answer many questions that were not answered in the mentioned publications, including some important issues that were just sketched in some previous studies. The first group of questions concerns Genchev’s political and intellectual formations in 1950s and 1960s. Special attention will be put to Genchev and his role for the legitimization of a sacred national narrative. One of the main focuses of the project will be the very specific and often self-restrained dissident thinking of Genchev. Special module of my project will be the analysis of highly debatable and contestable N. Genchev’s memoires. The Genchev’s break up with the Faculty of History and the journey to the Faculty of Philosophy will be the final step in my analysis.
How do writers perceive reading and what strategies do they employ in its politics? How could one read a text which resists narration, and how could one read a text that insists on rereading in order to be understood? How is reading presented in mid-20th-century fiction? What is 'blind reading', what is its relation to unreading and could we define reading as a form of blindness?
This research project focuses on the politics of (un)reading and the textual policies of mid-20th-century fiction. Politics of reading is understood as the specific textual strategies the works impose on their readers, the literary practices and policies that are used to gain and hold power in the text or to engage a reader. Vladimir Nabokov's and Maurice Blanchot's stories from the 30s-60s will serve to probe the prospective collaboration of cognitive approaches to literary narrative and reception theory. The role of gaps and context in the act of reading and their interaction with the reader as well as the relation reading – blindness will constitute the nodal points of discussion. The main objective of the interdisciplinary study is to find out how the two frameworks could work together and to outline a new cognitive reception theory. In addition, it will compare and contrast Nabokov's and Blanchot's theories of reading and their application in a mirroring cyclic recurrence: the required necessity for rereading and the impossibility of narrating.
The Turkish (and especially Ottoman Turkish) language periodicals, published after the Bulgarian state was reestablished in 1878, are still an obscure topic even for the scientific community. Building upon a successfully completed preliminary research about locating and digitization of selected periodicals, the main goal of this project is to utilize the publications in those periodicals to reconstruct the image of the Turkish speaking minority population in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian ummah was far from the homogenous entity as it is often deemed to have been. The temporal focus will be the 1923 – 1944 period when the internal segregation among the Muslims reached their peak. The disagreements were rooted in the varied opinions on the reforms of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and especially the polemics on the introduction of the new Latin script, which one could speculate literally led to an Alphabet war. Two major groups emerged: Muslim traditionalists and Turkish nationalists, each eager to express and propagate their conflicting views on the newspaper pages.