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9%OFFPaulina Bren - The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring - 9780801476426 - V9780801476426
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The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring

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Description for The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring Paperback. Num Pages: 264 pages, 15. BIC Classification: 1DVK; 3JJP; HBJD; HBLW3; HBTB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 155 x 231 x 16. Weight in Grams: 386.

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. ... Read more

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.

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Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2010
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Number of pages
264
Condition
New
Number of Pages
264
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801476426
SKU
V9780801476426
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Paulina Bren
Paulina Bren is Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Vassar College. She is the recipient of fellowships from, among others, the Fulbright-Hays, the SSRC, and the ACLS. For 2009–2010, she is a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study.

Reviews for The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring
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 ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring


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