Paper short abstract:

The paper raises the question of (mis)understanding the religious in the process of modernization. Translating "religion" is perceived “from the margins” in terms of both the subject, ie. the "small" Bulgarian culture, and the approach, ie. the postsecular reading of the local literary studies.

Paper long abstract:

The paper raises the question of understanding the religious in the modern Bulgarian culture. The context is given by the ambiguous modernization experience by the local intellectual elites in the first decades of the 20th century. The focus is on Bulgarian literary criticism, as the literary studies discourse is perceived as a unique testimony of overlapping various orders of knowledge that have different genealogies, i.e. the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestant one. The study refers to the assumptions of postsecularism and the idea of understanding ideological horizons in (crypto)confessional or (crypto)theological terms.

Several examples of the Bulgarian literary criticism from the interwar period are brought up in order to reveal the ways in which the religious (as opposed to the secular) is understood and functionalized. The analysis is conducted in the context of the transfer of modern ideas regarding the notion of religion, as the particular focus is on the role of a model of understanding the relation between the religious and the secular that is associated with the Protestant thought and predominates in the social sciences and humanities.

The question of importing, translating and new (mis)understanding of the religious is perceived “from the margins” in terms of both – the subject, i.e. the Bulgarian culture which is understudied within the field of the intellectual history, and the approach, i.e. the postsecular deconstruction of meanings used in the local literary studies. The aim is to go beyond the research practice to investigate the local Orthodox ideological horizons based on the Western-centric scientific presumptions and prejudices and to address the question of the consequence of “translating” religion for both – the local views on the national identity and the local scientific matrices.