reading

his paper develops a methodological framework to guide the efforts of a research team united by the task of investigating the reader in contemporary Bulgarian literature. For this purpose, we start from the receptive theory of Wolfgang Iser, but the authors develop, change and adapt this theory to the team's own goals. As a result, The Implicit Reader is seen as a textual program and normative instance in the texts, with which try to control and guide the behavior of their real readers. The categories of analysis with which this program can be approached and explored are grouped into three major groups: “repertoires”, “strategies” and “communicative competences”. They are further divided into finer operational sub-categories and tools, allowing shared methodologies of work between team members and comparability of research results.

The following text aims to analyze a growing mass of clichés and their penetrating power in popular Bulgarian literature. To understand how common notions are shared between the author and the implied reader we will discuss “More than love” by Radoslav Gizgindzhiev. It is a bizarre novel, where quasi-spiritual slogans are entangled with prescriptive and hypnotic guidance, which constitutes the narrator as an omnipotent godlike figure. Along with that, the analysis is focused on tracing how a peculiar mix of popular “quotes”, media imitations, and superstitions could melt into a story that becomes a market success.

Within the framework of the research project “Reading Practices in Bulgaria 2018”, the text presents an analysis of a Bulgarian contemporary literary work directed towards the popular reading taste. Nedyalko Slavov’s novel Piaffe is a fictional narrative that clearly targets the wide Bulgarian readership. It is amongst the top-ranking widely-read books in Bulgaria of 2018. The novel treats the subject of doomed love between a man and woman via a mixture of mythological allegories and metaphysical conceptions, forming a stereotypical axiological model of erotic interaction. Situating the love conflict within the cultural context of complex and challenging modernity, this strategy ultimately produces a multiplication of popular ideologemes and mythologemes, which are supposedly overlooked by the reader who is expected to treat them uncritically and beyond any self-assessment. The novel is an example of auto-exoticization of one's own/the native through its refraction in the context of the foreign/unknown, thus implying a stereotypically ignorant or ill-informed Bulgarian reader who is nonetheless capable of gaining high-level cultural competence both in relation to local conventions and clichés, and to the complex system of values of a progressive but largely undigested foreign culture.

The preliminary results from the study „Reading Practices in Bulgaria: The Implicit Reader in the Text“ identified different images of readers and readership, produced by various Bulgarian literary and media works. In spite of the genre convergence between the so-called „high“ and the so-called „popular“ literature, it was found that „high“ works leave more space for reader navigation and interpretation and open more free spaces for a wide range of different readers. On the other hand, popular literature has proven to be much more controlling and guiding. It allows its implicit reader some complex and specialized competencies, but only as far as the levels of genre are concerned. On the other hand, the popular texts expect significantly less from their reader what concerns other abilities: reading verbal and style registers, ability to understand complex metaphors and symbolic motifs, understanding of character building and conflicts. The text expectations toward the reader. What concerns philosophical and axeological levels in popular readings, the text expectations are especially modest: such works often presuppose a one-sided patriotic consensus among their audiences. As for the small number of media texts of scandalous journalists that were analyzed in the frame of the collective study, they model a similar patriotic audience, yet, in a state of anger and emotional excess. In parallel with this „state of emergency“ of communication, media texts model a clear hierarchy between the undisputed authority of their charismatic authors and the supposedly silent, admiring readers, merging into a homogeneous and emotional audience of like-minded people (implicit image of „the angry People“, construed by the media text).