Feuilletons, Flicks, and Frequencies: Engaging with Media in 19th/20th-Century Russia and Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The new media forms that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – film and radio – added new methods of interacting with the world, altering profoundly the ways in which its “facts” were defined and received. For the partially-literate societies of East-Central/Southeastern Europe and Russia in particular, these new media forms, which did not require knowledge of the written word to be understood, transformed popular culture and even portended a greater “democratization” of information. At the same time, however, both film and radio were closely, even symbiotically, connected to the “traditional” press. Newspapers and magazines offered the most direct route for the watching/listening public to interact with “their” movies and programs in ways that were both public and personal – a practice that had roots in the feuilletons established and curated by journalists earlier in the nineteenth century. They were also forums in which the literati could attempt to work out their anxieties over the potential impact of new media on culture and society and, indeed, to exercise influence over how these new media would be used. Our panel examines three unique perspectives on these complex dynamics, providing case studies from late imperial Russia, interwar Hungary and Austria, and interwar Bulgaria.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary Panels

Organizer

• Andrew Behrendt, U of Pittsburgh

Chair

• Alice Osborne Lovejoy, U of Minnesota

Papers

• Decoding the Facts of Chattering Narrators: The Response of Jewish Journalism to the Feuilleton in Imperial Russia - Meital Orr, Georgetown University

• Mein Film, Our Film: Defining Movie-Goers’ Interactions with Cinema in Post-Habsburg Austria and Hungary - Andrew Behrendt, U of Pittsburgh

• High Culture on the Radio Waves: Bulgarian Literati Adapt (to) the Early Radio - Irina Gigova, College of Charleston

Discussant

• Dawn A Seckler, U of Pittsburgh