Greengrocer and His TV

The Culture of Communism After the 1968 Prague Spring

Häftad, Engelska, 2010

AvPaulina Bren

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The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2010-04-15
Mått152 x 231 x 18 mm
Vikt386 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor264
FörlagCornell University Press
ISBN9780801476426

Tillhör följande kategorier

Introduction1. "A Criminal Comedy but of a Revivalist Spirit": The Beginning and the End of the Prague Spring2. Purge and the Remaking of a Socialist Citizenry3. Intellectuals, Hysterics, and "Real Men": The Prague Spring Officially Remembered4. The Quiet Life versus a Life in Truth: Writing the Script for Normalization5. Broadcasting in the Age of Late Communism6. Jaroslav Dietl: Normalization's Narrator7. The Socialist Family and Its Caretakers8. Self-Realization and the Socialist Way of LifeConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

Doing the history of passivity and accommodation is not easy, and Bren proceeds ingeniously by exploring the subtle buying into the system by the vast viewing audience that embraced the lives of the characters on popular television serials, lives redolent of what 'normalization' meant. Then, in a particularly revealing step, she examines the awkward response to reruns of some of the most popular of these serials in the aftermath of what she calls Czechoslovakia's 'late communism.'- Robert Legvold (Foreign Affairs) Engagingly written, smart, and surprising, The Greengrocer and His TV will be directly useful to scholars and students of European cultural and intellectual history, media studies, and the Cold War. But thanks to its wit and insight, Paulina Bren's Greengrocer is one of those rare academic monographs that repays reading from cover to cover, making it a pleasure for readers beyond the university classroom.... Bren's analysis of normalization-era television serials as a lens through which to understand late Socialism helps her move quickly beyond the standard dualisms that have dominated scholarship on the Cold War for so long.- Andrea Orzoff (Austrian History Yearbook) Paulina Bren has delved into the letters written to Czechoslovak TV in the communist era to paint a fascinating picture of reactions to the regime's attempt to produce programs that were both entertaining and ideologically correct.- "Eastern Approaches" blog (The Economist)

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BREN, Bren, Paulina Bren, Mary Neuburger, Vassar College) Bren, Paulina (Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin) Neuburger, Mary (Associate Professor of History, Associate Professor of History

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