The greengrocer and his TV : the culture of communism after the 1968 Prague Spring / Paulina Bren.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bren, Paulina, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dietl, Jaroslav, 1929-1985--Criticism and interpretation.

Dietl, Jaroslav.

Communism and culture--Czechoslovakia--History--20th century.

Communism and culture.

Political culture--Czechoslovakia--History--20th century.

Political culture.

Television and politics--Czechoslovakia--History--20th century.

Television and politics.

Czechoslovakia--Politics and government--1968-1989.

Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia--Social life and customs--20th century.

Czechoslovakia--Intellectual life--20th century.

Czechoslovakia--History--Intervention, 1968--Influence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 250 pages)

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, [N.Y.] : Cornell University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 1970's and 1980's. 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.

Contents:

"A criminal comedy but of a revivalist spirit" : the beginning and the end of the Prague Spring

Purge and the remaking of a socialist citizenry

Intellectuals, hysterics, and "real men" : the Prague Spring officially remembered

The quiet life versus a life in truth : writing the script for normalization

Broadcasting in the age of late communism

Jaroslav Dietl : normalization's narrator

The socialist family and its caretakers

Self-realization and the socialist way of life.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9780801462146

0801462142

9780801462153

0801462150

OCLC:

732956588