Book Award
2012 Winner of the European Studies Book Award
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times.
The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear.
Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience.
Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.
Related Websites: Author's Blog, Cornell University Press, Amazon.com, Barnes & Nobles
-------------------------------
About the European Studies Book Award
The Council's European Studies Book Award is awarded every two years and honors the best first book on any subject in European Studies published within a two-year period. A multi-disciplinary Book Award Committee appointed by the Council’s Executive Committee chooses the winner and a formal presentation of the award is conducted at the Council’s International Conference of Europeanists. The winning author receives $1000 and travel assistance to attend the conference and award ceremony.
Nominations may be submitted by the publisher, author or an admiring colleague, and must be accompanied by six (6) copies of the nominated title separately mailed to the Council for European Studies and the five members of its Book Award Committee. The nomination period for the 2014 award will be formally opened on July 1, 2013. All nominations must be received by September 30, 2013. For more information on how to nominate titles for this award, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
For the 2014 Book Award competition, each nominated title must meet the following criteria:
• must be the first book written by the nominee in the field of European Studies;
• must be published between October 15, 2011 and September 30, 2013;
• must not be a reprint or re-edition of a previously published book;
• must be the work of one author only;
• the author must be a member of the Council for European Studies or must hold a full-time faculty appointment at an institution that is a member.
