Absent Writing
Abstract:
Most Bulgarian scholars believe that Bulgarian women’s literary history begins early in the 20th century. There are, however, quite a few women’s voices in the second half of the 19th century, which have been only partially studied. It can be claimed that, during that period, women writers exist in two contrasting ways:
- through written and published texts;
- through written, but unpublished texts, about which we learn from “lists of absence” (documents about unpublished writings, comprised usually by the authors themselves).
This study will compare absent to present texts by writing women, conceptualizing absence as a gap, which can be used as a model of (women’s) literary situation and as tool for the transformation of the grand narratives of the Bulgarian writing context. Constructing a model out of absent writing requires answers to some questions: what are the relations between literature and published texts, on one hand, and, on the other, between non-literature and unpublished texts? What is the literary status of absent texts? The broadest proposition will be that women’s writing, existing in absence, re-evaluates and transforms the potentialities of literature as presence.
Bozhana Filipova
SvD, May 2010
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