CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Wcislik, Piotr Jan |
|---|---|
| Title | What does it mean that Communism has ended? Disintegration of the dissident counterculture and politics of memory in Post-Communist Poland |
| Summary | The study contributes to understanding of the role of collective memory in the public and political life of post-Communist Central Europe. The author provides a critical account of the disintegration of the dissident counterculture during the first months of the Polish transition. The political process that become to be known as the ‘war on the top’ was one of the founding moments of Poland’s recent history, highly consequential for the shape of public life after 1989. The author analyses its ideological sources and concludes that the single most important factor that made the conflict inevitable was the clash of two politics of collective memory of the two oppositional subcultures that found themselves on a collision course in the aftermath of the establishment of the first non-Communist government. The author shows that in the course of the ‘war on the top’ both parties discursively enacted politically charged narratives of transition which, on the one hand, corresponded to their respective subcultural memories, and, on the other hand, constituted a backdrop against which the two groups struggled for imposing political taxonomies consistent with their knowledge-political interests and oriented at moral exclusion of the adversary. Finally, the findings of the study are interpreted in the larger Central European context, using a Czech-Slovak example. In terms of methodology, the author brings together theoretical insights from various fields of social inquiry: memory studies, cultural and intellectual history, and social theory of knowledge. |
| Supervisor | Rev, Istvan |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/wcislik_piotr.pdf |
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