Call for Papers: "Sots-Speak: Regimes of Language under Socialism"

[Petre Petrov]

Apologies for the previous posting in which the top of the announcement got
shaved off somewhere between my email account and the listserv. Below is the
full text of the CFP.



*Call for Papers*

* *

*Sots-Speak**:*

*Regimes of Language under Socialism*

*May 13-15, 2011*

* *

*Princeton University*

*Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures*



The attempt to build communism in Eastern Europe was accompanied by the
development of a distinctive language paradigm, first in the Soviet Union,
then—by a process of cultural translation and local adaptation—in the
satellite states of the Socialist Bloc. The official discourse possessed its
own “speech genres” (tied to specific communicative contexts, social roles,
and political tasks), easily recognizable rhetorical patterns and lexical
peculiarities. It is intuitively obvious that this discourse, which we
provisionally label *sots-speak*, was instrumental in legitimizing and
perpetuating the political system, in shaping individual psychologies and
cultural expressions. However, our knowledge of its exact nature and
practical existence remains sketchy, as the topic still awaits systematic
research. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars whose
work helps shed light on the politico-ideological idiom(s) of state
socialism, so that we can begin to develop a sophisticated, multi-layered
picture of this special universe of discourse. A deeper understanding of its
constitutive linguistic features and the tendencies that define its
evolution represents a major desideratum on its own; yet we see this
understanding as prerequisite for engaging in questions of broader cultural
significance and soliciting a range of (inter)disciplinary inquiries
(sociolinguistics, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural and
literary studies, political science, etc.). The following questions merely
suggest a few general ways in which to frame our investigation; each of the
areas can be illuminated through analysis of specific topics:



   - What is the relation between the linguistic theories and utopias of the
   cultural avant-garde and the linguistic regimes of state socialism?
   - Can we isolate and analyze expressive features uniquely native to these
   regimes? What are the stable rhetorical patterns and lexical inventories of
   *sots-speak*? What communicative functions do they serve?
   - What was the social reception of the ideological “tongues” of socialism
   in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? How can we study the dynamic between
   inherited mentalities and the novel linguistic paradigms?
   - What is the relationship between language and political power? What
   powers are invested or (assumed to reside) in language? How effective was
   official language in fulfilling the functions with which it was charged? How
   do we know? What determines this efficacy?
   - What is the relationship between signified and signifier in *sots-speak
   *, between ideological meaning and its material carrier? How does it
   change over time (the fading of meaning, the public’s de-sensitization
   toward the appeal of ideologically charged language, etc.)?
   - How are social roles and identities concretely played and claimed in
   the use of official idiom (the performance Stephen Kotkin has called
   “speaking Bolshevik”)?
   - Does *sots-speak* presuppose a distinctive kind of relay between
   speaker/author and recipient/audience? What is the dynamic of stated and
   implied meaning in this discourse? How are unstated meanings coded and
   deciphered in specific discursive genres and situations?
   - What values (representational, stylistic, semantic) does
*sots-speak *assume
   when it is taken up into artistic discourse?
   - What constitutes linguistic dissidence under state socialism? What are
   the subversive appropriations of the official idiom in everyday life,
   unofficial folklore, and artistic texts?
   - What has been the “posthumous” fate of *sots-speak*? With what new
   value(s) has it been invested after the end of state socialism in Russia and
   Eastern Europe?

We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short CV, to
be submitted *by* *February 10, 2011* to fried at ujc.cas.cz

Inquiries regarding the conference’s topic, organization, or submission
process should be directed to ppetrov at princeton.edu

Those selected to give presentations will be contacted at the beginning of
March, 2011.

All participants must submit a full version of their paper by *April 15,
2011*; the papers will be posted on the conference's website and remain
available for the duration of the event.

We expect to be able to offer a limited number of travel subsidies to
participants from abroad.

Program committee:

Petre Petrov (Princeton)

Mirjam Fried (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)

Eliot Borenstein (NYU)

Serguei Oushakine (Princeton)

Kevin Platt (University of Pennsylvania)

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