Миряна Янакиева

The article deals with the influence of the deconstructionist theory of language on the field of literary criticism. I have tried to make a critical analysis and a reassessment of Paul de Man's thesis of the impossibility of reading. The analysis is focused on the basic argument of this thesis, namely the argument about the essentially rhetorical nature of the language. The subject of my analysis is Paul de Man's article "The Reading" where the author is trying to show how the rhetoric of the text of Proust's novel destroys what the text itself claims to be its meaning. My intention is not to reject de Man's reading, but to emphasize the elements in his text that could be a subject of discussion, and finally to defend the possibility of another type of reading of Proust's works. The aim of this type of reading would be to prove that the narrator in Proust's novels manages to convey the meaning and to tell the truth he intended to tell in spite of the destroying effect of the rhetorical structures of the texts in these novels. Main points of his rule, trying to achieve an objective evaluation of his personality as a ruler.

The article deals with the intertextual relations between Pencho Slaveykov's lyrical book entitled "Dream of happiness" (1907) and two anthologies of his: "On the Isle of the Blessed" (1910) and "German Poets" (1911). The former presents imaginary poets whose poems were written by Slaveykov himself. The latter is a real anthology of German poetry from Goethe to Slaveykov's time, translated by Slaveykov himself. Some of the poets presented in the two anthologies were real lyricists. We can find significant resemblances between their poems and Slaveykov's lyrical book "Dream of happiness". The paper makes an attempt at tracing those

There are many different conceptions in literary criticism because there are many different ways to answer the question “What is literature?” Every conception creates its own theoretical model of literature and its own methodology to analyze or to interpret literary works, which corresponds to this model. At first sight, we can make the following conclusion: if on theoretical level two conceptions are contradictory, it will be undesirable, unproductive, even impossible to combine their methods of reading literary works. However, the reality is more complicated. There is no unanimous response to the question if literary critics must stick rigidly to only one procedure chosen (semiotic-structural, hermeneutic, deconstructive) or it is admissible, even advisable, to combine different approaches in order to activate a bigger part of the potential meaning of the literary work. The article refers to ideas about this problem of some well-known theorists such as Hirsh, Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gerard Genette, Paul Ricœur and it considers two approaches to literary texts – the structural approach and the deconstructive one. Its main proposition is that even though these approaches are contradictory, both prove that every meaning is a result of inner relations between the linguistic elements in a given text. So, the collaboration between them is possible, but on condition that they should not be confused. In the course of their interpretation of a literary work, literary critics must explain clearly when and why he follows the structural method, when and why he includes the point of view of deconstruction.