Mass Culture under Communism
RUSS256-HMCS256
Macalester College, Spring, 2008
Instructor: Jim von Geldern
Class: MWF 10:10 am-11:40 am
Room: Humanities 215
E-mail: vongeldern@macalester.edu
Office: H207
Office Hours: Tuesday, 2:30-3:15, Thursday 12-1
Office Phone: 651-696-6568
COURSE DESCRIPTION
From October 1917, when the Bolsheviks stormed the Petrograd Post Office (not the Winter Palace, as movies would claim) until the recent era, when right-wing protestors storm the Moscow TV tower, Russian revolutionaries have been conscious of the power of mass communications. Driven not just to change the government, but the souls of its subjects, they have looked to mass culture to create new men and women. The Communist Party was the first to use mass culture as an explicit political tool; yet the harder the state tried, the more consumers subverted the intended messages. Never the brainwashed automatons of Orwell's nightmare fantasies, yet never the ideal thinking citizen of Jefferson's dreams, Soviets subjects perceived their world through the lens of mass culture, and helped shape it with their responses. That the audience continues to confound its self-elected shapers suggests how interesting the topic is. Starting from the detective tales and tearjerker movies of pre-revolutionary Russia, progressing through the marching songs and boy-meets-tractor movies of the Stalinist 1930s, and finishing with the dizzying variety of cultural expression of the glasnost era, from conservative patriotism to pornography, we will view Russian society through its cultural products. Included will be films, popular literature, posters, newspapers, popular songs, architecture, mass-mobilization organizations, etc. The materials should help us understand how Russian society has been seen by those who sponsor, make, and consume mass culture, and to examine the complex relations between these groups.
|
|
