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Speaking in Soviet Tongues - Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,249
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Speaking in Soviet Tongues - Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (Hardcover, New)
Series: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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From the classical dialogues of Plato to current political
correctness, manipulating language to advance a particular set of
values and ideas has been a time-honored practice. During times of
radical social and political change, the terms of debate themselves
become sharply contested: how people reject, redefine, and
reappropriate key words and phrases gives important symbolic shape
to their vision of the future. Especially in cataclysmic times, who
one is or wants to be is defined by how one writes and speaks. The
language culture of early Soviet Russia marked just such a tenuous
state of symbolic affairs. Partly out of necessity, partly in the
spirit of change, Bolshevik revolutionaries cast off old verbal
models of identity and authority and replaced them with a cacophony
of new words, phrases, and communicative contexts intended to
define and help legitimatize the new Soviet order. Pitched to an
audience composed largely of semiliterate peasants, however, the
new Bolshevik message often fell on deaf ears. Embraced by numerous
sympathetic and newly empowered citizens, the voice of Bolshevism
also evoked a variety of less desirable reactions, ranging from
confusion and willful subversion to total disregard. Indeed, the
earliest years of Bolshevik rule produced a communication gap that
held little promise for the makings of a proletarian dictatorship.
This gap drew the attention of language authorities-most notably
Maxim Gorky-and gave rise to a society-wide debate over the
appropriate voice of the new Soviet state and its citizenry.
Drawing from history, literature, and sociology, Gorham offers the
first comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of this critical
debate, demonstrating how language ideologies and practices were
invented, contested, and redefined. Speaking in Soviet Tongues
shows how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled
verbal creativity and utopian imagination while sowing the seeds
for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian "newspeak" known
to the modern era.
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