Legacies of Totalitarian Language in the Discourse Culture of the Post-totalitarian Era: The Case of Eastern Europe, Russia, and China - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0739164651 ISBN 13: 9780739164655

Publisher: Lexington Books (UK), 2011

Synopsis

This book is unique in its kind. It is the first scholarly work to attempt a comprehensive and fairly detailed look into the lingering legacies of the communist totalitarian modes of thought and expression in the new discourse forms of the post-totalitarian era. The book gives also new and interesting insights into the ways the new, presumably democratically-minded political elites in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe, Russia, and China manipulate language to serve their own political and economic agendas. The book consists of ten discrete discussions, nine case-studies or chapters and an introduction.

Chapter 1 discusses patterns of continuity and change in the conceptual apparatus and linguistic habits of political science and sociology practiced in the Czech Republic before and after 1989. Chapter 2 analyzes lingering effects of communist propaganda language in the political discourse and behavior in post-communist Poland. Chapter 3 analyzes the legacy of Soviet semantics in post-Soviet Moldovan politics through the prism of such politically contested words as democracy, democratization, and people. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the way in which communist patterns of thought and expression manifest themselves in the new political discourse in Romania and Bulgaria, respectively. Chapter 6 examines phenomena of change and continuity in the socio-linguistic and socio-political scene of post-Soviet Latvia. Chapter 7 analyzes the extent to which the language of the post-communist Romanian media differs from the official language of the communist era. Chapter 8 examines the evolution of Russian official discourse since the late eighties with a view of showing whether or not new phenomena in the evolution of post-Soviet discourse represent new development or just a mutation of the value-orientations of the old Soviet ideological apparatus. Chapter 9 gives a detailed and lucid account of the evolution of both official and non-official discourse in China since the end of the Mao era.

About this title

About the Author

Ernest Andrews is a visiting scholar at the Russian-Eastern European Institute at Indiana University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lexington Books (UK)
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0739164651
• ISBN 13: 9780739164655
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 230
• Editor: Ernest Andrews