My Life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes

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, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world. She also observes post-communist societies through the lens of societal trauma and explains how to understand the sudden fall into the populist trap. This demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted.

Magda Stroinska 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.

She has published numerous articles and book chapters and co-edited a number of books: on stereotypes in language teaching with Martin Löschmann (Stereotype im Fremdsprachenunterricht, Peter Lang 1998); on linguistic representations of culture (Relative points of view, Berghahn 2001); on Exile, language and identity (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2003), on International classroom: Challenging the notion (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2006), and on Unspeakable: Narratives of trauma (with Vikki Cecchetto and Kate Szymanski, Peter Lang 2014). She translated Victor Klemperer’s book The Language of the Third Reich from German into Polish and published it in 1992 (Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy, Toronto).