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The Sound and The Fury: Archeology Of Marital Quarrels The object of study is speech in marital quarrels. The argument is based on scenes of quarrels represented in literary, medical, sociological, pedagogical texts, newspaper articles, court hearings, psychiatric cases, transcriptions of therapeutic or everyday conversations. The study amalgamates the methodological perspectives of critical theory, discourse analysis, pragmatics and cultural studies. The goal is to provide an account of the discursive mechanisms that the actors in a marital quarrel use in order to articulate a statement beyond the sayable, for example by means of improvising with language, pragmatic conventions or knowledge. The strategy of the study consists in identifying such messages that the other participants in the scene tend to discard as meaningless voices, or in other words, to ignore them as noises. Starting from such unsayable statements, the analysis outlines their conditions of possibility by tracing the paradigmatic, syntagmatic and negative functions, the concepts, objects, subject positions, discursive modalities that make the statements possible; the mechanisms of desire, knowledge, power, capital triggered by the statements; the effects, strategies and tactics they bring about or open up. The marital scenes analyzed in the book are composed in a narrative about the attempts of teachers, priests, physicians, hygienists, sexologists, psychiatrists, publicists to manage quarrels as a risk both to the families themselves, to the future of their children and to the society in general. The narrative however does not describe the history or the story of such attempts at intervention, it rather tries to account for their geology in the sense of strata of knowledge providing the ground for family therapy (which is of key importance to the general argument as many of the transcripts of conversations are taken from family therapy sessions).

The paper presents the findings of a study of the legitimacy of social inequalities in the contemporary Bulgarian society. The discussion hovers around three unexpected observations of the study – the dominance of the economic inequality in the respondents’ accounts, the waning of their normative expectations, the erosion of the difference between socialism and capitalism, and the anticipation of a revolution to come. The paper proposes two alternative accounts of those observations, one from the perspective if structural functionalist versions of the Bulgarian sociology of stratification, and one from the perspective of what Foucault called racial wars.

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”(Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961) Thomas Pynchon’s earliest novels – V. (1963) The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) – were fictions which overtly addressed ideas of plot and history. Paranoid characters encounter multiple possible conspiracies, complots and possibilities of sinister networks in control of the world in which they live. At a time where conspiracy theorists were still considered part of a subculture, initial literary criticism of Pynchon’s conspiracy literature was successful in pursuing narratological and philosophical readings which interpreted those novels as postmodern lessons in paranoid reading styles, author schizophrenia, subjective erasure and ontological doubt. On this basis, for many, Pynchon was enshrined as one of the great postmodernist writers of the USA. Pynchon’s critique of late capitalism and the conspiracies in politics and history which continued to be central to his later literature – Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against The Day (2006) – was long overlooked, I would argue, because conspiracy theory itself could not be taken seriously within academia. Plot is a respectable object of literary study; complots are more problematic and in Pynchon’s case would be subsumed by the former, especially because he was taught for the narrative style rather than the content of his writing.In the 21st century, marked by 9/11, a number of things have changed, however. On the one hand, Pynchon studies has taken a turn towards history and politics and while conspiracy theory methods or topics have not become respectable to academics, they now reside in the mainstream of American culture and politics: A good story seems to carry more weight than facts in a post-truth society. Academic readers are starting to recognize the extent to which Pynchon’s fiction has always been fact-based and reflected historical, social and political contexts. What is troublesome about this new angle is the fact that paranoia, conspiracies and sinister plotting are no less prevalent in Pynchon’s latest novels – Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013).A conspiracy theorist is a person who claims to be an authority in possession of (alternative) facts: an author of an unwelcome truth. At one end of the spectrum is Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, at the other end is March Kelleher’s “Tabloid of the Damned” blog. In the current climate, the dilemma for respectable academic analysis has now become what perspective to put on a paranoid authorship at a time where our culture at large seems to be losing its grip on reality.