Адвокати, журналисти и щастливци. Репрезентации на съда и съдебната система в публичния дискурс
Lawyers, Journalists and the Lucky Guy: Representations of the Court and the System of Jurisdiction in the Public Discourse

Summary/Abstract: This paper addresses the public representation of institutions. The case study it analyses is connected with the literary images of the new judicial system of the Bulgarian Principality between 1878–1900. In the first theoretical part the paper elaborates the mechanism of impact: how do public images influence the institutional functioning? Several levels of possible impact are mentioned – impact of the social prestige of an institution, intervention in its communicative and cognitive institutional codes, influence upon the institutional legitimacy. The second part focuses on the image of the court and the judicial roles, procedures and texts of the low in the literary oeuvre of the Bulgarian writer Aleko Konstantinov. The analysis demonstrates the peculiar blindness of his literary rhetoric in front of the specific logic of the judicial system. The paper scrutinizes the comic and satirical techniques of the representations in questions, which reduce and simplify the image of the juridical institution. The simplification is result of the centrality of crucial fictional character in Aleko Konstantinov’s texts: the idealized narrator-intellectual. This narrator (who transcend all possible concrete roles and positions in the society) implies a surrounding fictional world in which the institutions and their roles are distant, vague, monstrous and repellent. The paper interprets these literary representations as incapability of the Bulgarian literature of the time to cope with various centres of „truth production“ in the emerging modern society.

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