Overview

My Life in Propaganda is Magda Stroińska's personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school, the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings, socialist realist art and film, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation's collective view of the world. The book demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted. Through her chosen field of linguistics, she analyzes ways in which propagandistic language, such as 'doubletalk, ' Orwellian 'Newspeak, ' 'weasel words, ' and, more colloquially, 'bullshit, ' is used to distort reality. This book demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted.

Full Product Details

9781990735332

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""In relatively free Western societies, we are used to the distortion of language in many contexts. Commercial advertisers will use language to try to convince us of the efficacy of their products. Political parties of a particular flavour, the policies of which are highly contestable, will describe their philosophy as ""progressive"" - how could anybody fail to support a ""progressive"" political programme? However, this all takes place in an environment of free debate and commercial competition as well as a system of contract law which would prevent businesses from misleading their customers. But what happens if the state monopolises economic life, education and all channels of mass communication? As Magda Stroinska shows, in this fascinating and personal account of the abuse of language, totalitarian states have, though the ages, effectively entrenched their position by abusing the meaning of words. Magda, a philologist, has lived in communist Poland and studied the growth of Nazi Germany. Nobody is better placed to explain how the control of language can lead to the control of society."" Dr. Philip Booth Director of Catholic Mission Professor of Finance, Public Policy and Ethics St. Mary's University, London UK"

Author Information

Magda Stroińska MA (Warsaw), PhD (Edinburgh) has been a Professor of Linguistics and German at McMaster University since 1988. Her major areas of research and publication include sociolinguistics, analysis of discourse, and cross-cultural issues in pragmatics and cognition, in particular linguistic representations of culture, cultural stereotyping, language and politics, propaganda, the issues of identity in exile, aging and bilingualism, translation, interpretation and language brokering, as well as language and psychological trauma. She has published numerous articles and book chapters and co-edited a number of books: on stereotypes in language teaching with Martin L�schmann (Stereotype im Fremdsprachenunterricht, Peter Lang 1998); on linguistic representations of culture (Relative Points of View, Berghahn 2001); on Exile, language and identity (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2003), on International classroom: Challenging the notion (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2006), and on Unspeakable: Narratives of trauma (with Vikki Cecchetto and Kate Szymanski, Peter Lang 2014). I translated Victor Klemperer's book The Language of the Third Reich from German into Polish and published it in 1992 (Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy, Toronto).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available