Danuta Ulicka
"Death" of Theory-Imagined or Actual?
Postr-structuralism -Deconstruction - Neo-Pragmaticism and
Traditions of Contemporary Literary Studies in
East-Central Europe
Danuta Ulicka attempts to evaluate contemporary diagnoses about the
"death of theory" and novel "methodological turns"—widespread in contemporary
lite-rary studies. In the opinion of the author, the "turns" that have
characterized app-roaches to literary studies since 1966 are in reality
"returns," and post-modern theo¬ry is a discontinuation of modern theories that
emerged in Central and Eastern Europe. Consequently, the Second Literary
Avant-garde—she thus calls studies that appeared from approximately 1966 can be
genetically linked to the achie¬vements of the First Avant-Garde (Vladimir
Propp, Mikhail Bakhtin et al).