Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewDoing 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 the most popular of these serials in the aftermath of what she calls Czechoslovakia's 'late communism.'
-- Robert Legvold * Foreign Affairs *
Engagingly written, smart, and surprising, The Greengrocer and His TV will be directly useful to scholars and students of European cultural and intellectual history, media studies, and the Cold War. But thanks to its wit and insight, Paulina Bren's Greengrocer is one of those rare academic monographs that repays reading from cover to cover, making it a pleasure for readers beyond the university classroom.... Bren's analysis of normalization-era television serials as a lens through which to understand late Socialism helps her move quickly beyond the standard dualisms that have dominated scholarship on the Cold War for so long.
-- Andrea Orzoff * Austrian History Yearbook *
Paulina Bren has delved into the letters written to Czechoslovak TV in the communist era to paint a fascinating picture of reactions to the regime's attempt to produce programs that were both entertaining and ideologically correct.
-- "Eastern Approaches" blog * The Economist *
Table of ContentsIntroduction1. "A Criminal Comedy but of a Revivalist Spirit": The Beginning and the End of the Prague Spring2. Purge and the Remaking of a Socialist Citizenry3. Intellectuals, Hysterics, and "Real Men": The Prague Spring Officially Remembered4. The Quiet Life versus a Life in Truth: Writing the Script for Normalization5. Broadcasting in the Age of Late Communism6. Jaroslav Dietl: Normalization's Narrator7. The Socialist Family and Its Caretakers8. Self-Realization and the Socialist Way of LifeConclusionNotes
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