Imagining Mass Dictatorships The Individual and the Masses in Literature and Cinema

by Schoenhals, Michael; Sarsenov, Karin

• ISBN13: 9781137330680
• ISBN10: 1137330686
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-08-20
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This volume in the series 'Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century' sees twelve Swedish, Korean and Japanese scholars, theorists, and historians of fiction and non-fiction probe the literary subject of life in 20th century mass dictatorships. Generously defined, the 'literary' in this context covers a wide spectrum of narrative forms, ranging from the commercial television documentary to popular crime fiction, and from digitally restored amateur film on DVD to the Nobel Prize winning novel. It deals with mass dictatorship regimes as far apart as Nazi Germany, Park Chung-hee's South Korea, Stalinist Russia, post-war Hungary, Mao Zedong's China, apartheid's South Africa, and Ceausescu's Romania. The interplay of analytical ideas and the transnational perspectives that this volume brings add a new dimension to our understanding of traumatic events – 'dark chapters' – in 20th century history. By focusing the immense role of imagination within a cultural discourse otherwise dominated by irrefutable facts such as the existence of Holocaust and Gulag, this volume opens new ways of thinking perceptively about trauma, power and self.

Author Biography

Michael Schoenhals is Professor of Chinese at Lund University, Sweden. He was a contributor to previous volumes in the Mass Dictatorship series, and a co-editor of the volume entitled Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. He has published extensively on society and politics in the People's Republic of China, including Mao's Last Revolution (2006; co-authored by Roderick MacFarquhar), a major history of the Cultural Revolution. His most recent book entitled Spying for the People: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (2014) tells the story of domestic agent and operational work by Mao's state security organs at the height of the Cold War.
 
Karin Sarsenov is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. She has published extensively on Russian women's literature, including a monograph and a co-edited volume on Nina Sadur. She has conducted projects on women's autobiography, representations of Russian marital migration in literature and film and the Russian literature curriculum.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; Michael Schoenhals and Karin Sarsenov
1. The Constitution of a Reliable Self: Word for Word by Oleg Dorman and Lilianna Lungina; Karin Sarsenov
2. The Post-Communist Afterlife of Dissident Writers: The Case of Herta Müller; Anamaria Dutceac Segesten
3. Challenging the 'Holocaust-reflex': Imre Kertész's Fatelessness: A Novel; Anders Ohlsson
4. Ulrike and the War: World War II, Mass Dictatorship and Nazism in the Eyes of a German Girl ; Bibi Jonsson
5. Through the eyes of a child: Childhood and Mass Dictatorship in Modern European Literature; Karin Nykvist
6. Is Fictional Literature Incapable of Imagining the Shoah?; Björn Larsson
7. Politics, Imagination and Everyday Life in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup; Seonjoo Park
8. Innocence by Association? Everyday Nazism on DVD; Mats Jönsson
9. The Good, the Bad and the Collaborators: Swedish World War II Guilt Redefined in Twenty-First Century Crime Fiction?; Kerstin Bergman
10. Who are 'we'?: The Dynamics of Consent and Coercion in Yi Mun-gu's Our Neighbourhood; Shin Hyung-ki
11. Swedish Proletarians towards Freedom. Ideals of Participation as Propaganda in the Communist Children's Press of the 1920s; Jimmy Vulovic
12. The Masses in Their Own Write (and Draw): A Heroes' Register from the Great Cultural Revolution in Yunnan; Michael Schoenhals
Postscript; Naoki Sakai