My Life in Propaganda Language and Totalitarian Regimes
My Life in Propaganda Language and Totalitarian Regimes

My Life in Propaganda

Language and Totalitarian Regimes

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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; and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world. 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. The book demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted. 

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About the author

Magda Stroinska

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.

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