Socialist Realism Without Shores

by Lahusen, Thomas; Dobrenko, E. A.; Fish, Stanley Eugene; Jameson, Fredric

• ISBN13: 9780822319412
• ISBN10: 0822319411
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-06-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Socialist Realism without Shores offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism - an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides - from the 'centre,' Russia, to various points at the 'periphery' - China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States.The contributors argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form and demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made 'Soviet' art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. Socialist Realism without Shores also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism - Stalinist aesthetics, 'anthropological' readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism.Contributors. Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans Gunther, Julia Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, Regine Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang, Sergei Zimovets

Table of Contents

Introduction

Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores: Some Historical Remarks on the "Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life

Socialist Realism with

Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero

A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories

A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism

Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question

Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin's Fairy Tale to Molotov's Lacquer Box

The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who "Invented"

Socialist Realism?

Censorship as the Triumph of Life

Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema

Son of the Regiment: Deus ex Machina

Soft-Porn, Kitsch, and Post-Fascist Bodies: The East German Novel of Arrival

"Why is the Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?"

Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947-53

W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Socialist Realism

The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese Socialist Realism

Primitive Communism and the Other Way Around

The Past as a Dustbin, or, The Phantoms of Socialist Realism

Index

Notes on Contributors

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