‘Take Better Aim!’: The Korean War as the Bull’s-eye of Socialist Realism Cover Image

„Miř přesněji!“ Korejská válka jako černý bod socialistického realismu
‘Take Better Aim!’: The Korean War as the Bull’s-eye of Socialist Realism

Author(s): Vít Schmarc
Subject(s): History
Published by: AV ČR - Akademie věd České republiky - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny
Keywords: Korean War; Socialist Realism;

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the representation of the Korean War as a fundamental event in the print media and belles-lettres f Stalinist Czechoslovakia from 1950 to 1952. It focuses on the special features of the mechanism of producing the mage of the ‘enemy’ and the ‘hostile’ space, as well as analysing the interaction of period journalism and poetry. The uthor analyses the central phenomena, which created a cornerstone of the contemporaneous image of the Korean War the figure of the leader and the mythology of the origin of the ‘enemy’), and correlates them with more general echanisms of creating reality in the first half of the 1950s. He also points out the interlinkage and mutual influences of he pointed propagandistic rhetoric and poetic imagery. The article draws on collections of verse, which contain poems eacting to the war in Korea, and on occasional poems, journalism, and caricatures published mainly in the daily Rudé rávo and the weekly Tvorba. In method, the article is in the tradition of research on ideology as a system of representing the real conditions of existence (as in the work of Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek) and the tradition of emiotic analysis of culture and society in the Stalinist period (as in the work of Vladimír Macura), identifying the very ctive, productive relationship between literature and the powers that be, which creates the very essence of socialist ealism as a system (as discussed by Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko).

  • Issue Year: XXI/2014
  • Issue No: 01-02
  • Page Range: 44-78
  • Page Count: 35
  • Language: Czech