Totalitarian Communication: Hierarchies, Codes and Messages

Open Access Published by transcript Verlag 2010

Totalitarian Communication

Hierarchies, Codes and Messages

Edited by: Kirill Postoutenko
Funded by: Knowledge Unlatched - KU Select 2018: Backlist Collection

In the series Kultur- und Medientheorie

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839413937

Overview
Contents

About this book

Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism. After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of increasing political determination of the burgeoing field.
Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground remains the thing of the future.
This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term »totalitarian«: no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.

Author / Editor information

Kirill Postoutenko (PhD) teaches literature, sociology and anthropology at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Saint-Petersburg and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris.

Reviews

»Die einzelnen Beiträge [...] bieten [...] ein facettenreiches Bild von kommunikativen Praktiken und asymmetrischen Öffentlichkeiten in Diktaturen, wobei der Schwerpunkt der Beiträge auf der ehemaligen Sowjetunion liegt. Anregend wird der Band aber durch die Einbeziehung von Beispielen aus den USA, Frankreich, Großbritannien, einem Überblick über Diskurse zu Folterungen (von der Antike bis zu den Anschlägen am 11. September 2001 in den USA) etc. Das heißt, sowohl der Zeitraum wie auch die Länderbeispiele sind weitgespannt. Man kann dies kritisieren [...], doch - und das möchte ich für diesen Band betonen - kann Vielfalt auch sehr anregend sein.«
Inge Marszolek, H-Soz-u-Kult, 09.03.2011/Clio-online, 1 (2011)

»Die Beiträge sind in ihrer Gesamtheit stimmig zusammengestellt und wurden sorgfältig editiert. Der Band vermittelt eine breitgefächerte Methodenpalette zum Studium des Totalitarismus als eines historischen und kommunikationstechnischen Phänomens, welches ergiebige, gegenwartsnahe Diskussionsfelder eröffnet und zu weiteren konstruktiven interdisziplinären Arbeiten einlädt [...].«
Konstantin Kaminskij, MEDIENwissenschaft, 1 (2011)

Reviewed in:

GMK-News, 1 (2011)
Násilí, 23/11 (2010)
IDÄNTUTKIMUS, 4 (2010), Jussi Lassila
laviedesidées.fr, 3 (2011), Larissa Zakharova
Problemy sovremennogo obrazovanija, 5 (2011), Boris Lanin

Supplementary Materials

Leseprobe

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	1
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	5
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	9
Prolegomena to the Study of Totalitarian Communication Kirill Postoutenko Open Access Download PDF	11
Hierarchies
Stalinist Rule and Its Communication Practices An Overview Lorenz Erren Open Access Download PDF	43
Public Communication in Totalitarian, Authoritarian and Statist Regimes A Comparative Glance Jean K. Chalaby Open Access Download PDF	67
Performance and Management of Political Leadership in Totalitarian and Democratic Societies The Soviet Union, Germany and the United States in 1936 Kirill Postoutenko Open Access Download PDF	91
Codes
The Duce in the Street Illumination in Fascism Nanni Baltzer Open Access Download PDF	125
Audio Media in the Service of the Totalitarian State? Dmitri Zakharine Open Access Download PDF	157
The Birth of Socialist Realism out of the Spirit of Radiophonia Maxim Gorky’s Project “Literaturnaja ucheba” Jurij Murašov Open Access Download PDF	177
Messages
Totalitarian Propaganda as Discourse A Comparative Look at Austria and France in the Fascist Era Alexander Hanisch-Wolfram Open Access Download PDF	197
Violence, Communication and Imagination Pre-Modern, Totalitarian and Liberal-Democratic Torture Werner Binder Open Access Download PDF	217
The Lure of Fascism? Extremist Ideology in the Newspaper Reality Before WWII John Richardson Open Access Download PDF	249
Post-Totalitarian Communication?
Uneasy Communication in the Authoritarian State The Case of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Kyrgyzstan Irina Wolf Open Access Download PDF	275
Afterthoughts on “Totalitarian” Communication Andreas Langenohl Open Access Download PDF	301
AUTHORS Open Access Download PDF	313

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Edition: 1. Aufl.
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 320
Keywords: Communication; Discourse; Media; Europe 1900-1945; Society; Sociology of Media; History of the 20th Century; Media Aesthetics; European History; Sociology

eBook

Published: March 27, 2014
ISBN: 9783839413937