Media Culture in Russia’s Long Twentieth Century

Catalog description

For much of the last century and a half, the Russian state in its different iterations (late imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet) has not only commissioned positive representations of its itself, its agenda, and the society over which it was ruling but has also imposed censorship on critical ones. Over the course of this period, however, cultural producers driven by a variety of agendas have sought and found ways to create such critical representations and distribute them to wider audiences, domestic or foreign. This confrontation has played out over numerous media and has accounted for a great deal of the specificity or the exaggerated popularity of some cultural forms in Russia such as the thick journal, samizdat, tamizdat, magnitizdat, the joke, and the highly specific structure and use of contemporary Russian internet. As we move chronologically forward, students will not only become familiar with the specific workings of different Russian media, with the texts produced in them and the political contexts shaping their use but they will also conceptualize them through the theoretical frameworks proposed by such media theorists as Marshall MacLuhan, Jurgen Habermas, Regis Debay, Raymond Williams, Michael Warner, and Lev Manovich.