Word: boym
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...offering, FC 85, “Japan Pop: From Basho to Banana,” teaches anime and manga, alongside other eclectic elements of Japanese popular culture. FC 72, “Russian Culture from Revolution to Perestroika,” taught by well-liked professor Svetlana Boym, offers Revolution-era avant-garde art, socialist realist works (including Eisenstein and the cinematic montage school), and other decidedly cool Russian stuff.Our top pick is FC 76, “Nazi Cinema: Fantasy Production in the Third Reich,” taught by the world’s reigning authority...
According to Svetlana Boym, who is the Reisinger professor of Slavic languages and literatures and professor of comparative literature, artists in the USSR offered a “vision of Paradise” that flatly contradicted the harsher realities of political purges, labor camps, and starvation...
...popular anthem of the era, for example, begins, “We were born to make fairy tales come true,” and presents an image of comrades working “with a flaming motor for a heart.” Boym noted the comic absurdity of the image: “If you know anything about the mechanics of motors, you know that ‘flaming’ is not a good sign!” Propagandistic art, she said, falls apart under close scrutiny because it was not intended for critical analysis. Instead of generating...
...Boym returned repeatedly to artistic “defamiliarization” of totalitarianism, using a term coined by Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky to describe literature’s ability to make the familiar elements of human life take on new significance—and even strangeness...
Ideally, defamiliarization can be an act of transcendence, making commonplace human rituals nearly sublime by elevating them to the realm of art. However, defamiliarization worked both ways, Boym argued. As a tool of Stalinist propaganda, art could lend a sense of wonder and exaltation, as in the harvest painting that declared the Stalinist slogan, “Life has become better. Life has become merrier.” The actual subject of the painting, a communal dinner in rural Russia, would itself have been unremarkable. But when metamorphosed into a massive genre painting as a monument to Stalinist benevolence, such...