The mythopoeia in Stalinist propaganda of post-war Poland
Abstract
This article analyzes the discourse of propaganda in the apogee of the Stalinist era in Poland (1949–1953) as creating a quasi-mythical reality (mythopoeia). The analysis draws on the structuralist conceptions of myth-making following the work of Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes expanded to the paradigm of social semiotics. The study demonstrates how the positioning of social actors creates cosmogonic relations between them. In this way, it subscribes into the project of sémiotique politique. It is argued that the key technique underlying the propaganda discourse is the dichotomization of reality reducible to a basic contrast between “communism” versus “capitalism.” Following Levi-Strauss, I analyze this dichotomization along the vertical and horizontal axes. I follow Barthes in treating myths not as a fundamental story but as a new unity of sense that is built over the common meanings. The material that informs this article is drawn from the early editions of the most influential daily newspaper in socialist Poland: Trybuna Ludu (People's Tribune) and a lifestyle weekly Przekrój.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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- A comparison of sign and symbol (their contents and boundaries)
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- Explaining educational experience: On one- and two-handed gestures as semiotic entities and the flexibility of their use
- Temporal phenomenology in Roentgen semiotics
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- Language as reflective experience
- Galaxies of meaning: Semiotics in media theory
- Ancient tradition and modern audacity: On the (proto-) semiotic ideas of Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz
- A semiotic analysis of sounds in personal computers: Toward a semiotic model of human-computer interaction
- In the name of the sign: The nsibidi script as the language and literature of the crossroads
- The materiality of narrative spaces: A theatre semiotics perspective into the teaching of physics
- Three women in semiotics: Welby, Boole, Langer
- Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts Peter Bichsel's Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch and Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy
- The role of matrices in preserving non-genetic data
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