Literatur | Philosophie | Sprache
Miriam Lubrich, 2006 | Bern, BE
Many totalitarian statesmen base their authority on authorship. Books by autocrats have a long tradition, from Julius Caesar to Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Despite radio and television, newspapers and social media being faster and having a wider reach to spread propaganda, dictators continue to write books. Why? And what do they have in common? “Author/itarian” analyses the rhetorical construction of dictator narratives. The study begins with an overview of the genre of dictator literature, its history, conventions, variety, purposes and consequences. Literary theory offers models of the author and his (rarely her) authority that has often been described as dictatorial. Subsequently, insights from literary theory, rhetoric and narratology are applied to political writing, in particular to four non-fiction books by post-Cold War dictators: Turkmenbashy (Turkmenistan), Maduro (Venezuela), Lukashenko (Belarus) and Kim Jong Un (North Korea). Surprisingly, these dictator-authors rarely use the narcissistic pronoun “I,” resorting instead to the pronouns “we,” “he” and “you.” This suggests that modern dictators use similar rhetorical and narratological devices, especially pronouns, to convey their ideologies in various cultural contexts. Their writings share a grammatical DNA of global authoritarianism.
Introduction
This study questions how dictators write books, how they convey their authority in the form of writing. Specifically, it examines how Turkmenbashy (Turkmenistan), Maduro (Venezuela), Lukashenko (Belarus) and Kim Jong Un (North Korea) formulate their authority as authors. What grammatical persons do they use and for what reason? What is the rhetorical and narratological construction of contemporary dictator narratives?
Methods
The paper comparatively analyses four dictator books in close readings: “Rukhnama” by Sapyrmurat Turkmenbashy (2001), “Chavismo, amor y patria” by Nicolás Maduro (2015), “Belarus and CIS: a path towards a common vision” by Alexander Lukaschenko (1998) and “Let us create new legendary tales in the construction sector of socialist construction” by Kim Jong Un (2023). Photos from the books illustrate the main findings, together with pictures from Xi Jinping’s “The governance of China.” Frameworks taken from literary theory, rhetoric and narratology offer insight into political writing.
Results
Dictator rhetoric serves ideological purposes. Contemporary writing across a wide geographic sphere and diverse genres shares certain grammatical features: The “I” of the authoritarian author is rare, and when it is used, then mostly to express modesty and gratitude to the citizens. Instead of using “I,” the authors resort to “we” to present the state as a community of equals or as a family, a unified mass, and to celebrate its collective achievements. They employ the third person, “he” as a rhetorical strategy to idealise themselves from an outside perspective. Turkmenbashy also uses “you” as a means of self-address. The dictator speaks to himself as a personification of his people. Autocrats as authors use the different grammatical pronouns in similar situations and for similar purposes. They rely on a dictatorial grammar, a tyrannical template.
Discussion
Several political scientists have studied the writings of dictators. Daniel Kalder (2018) offers an overview of writing in the 20th and 21st centuries, while others focus on specific aspects, such as Amy Liu in her statistical analysis of pronoun use in the Chinese,-speaking world, noting the preponderance of “we” rather than “I” as typical for personalist dictators. My study confirms their findings and highlights their consistency across four continents and various forms of texts. The literature of contemporary dictators differs from older works such as those of Hitler and Lenin, Stalin and Mao, which focus more on ideology and less on a generic form. To substantiate this finding, the corpus of the present study could be compared to a sample of texts from previous periods, or to books by democratic leaders today.
Conclusions
In their books, dictators spread authoritarian propaganda by means of a specific rhetoric. Although their writings differ in terms of context and content, autocrats from Turkmenistan to Venezuela, from North Korea to Belarus share a common rhetoric mode in their use of pronouns, perspective and persona.
Würdigung durch den Experten
Andrin Albrecht
In her paper, Miriam Lubrich demonstrates how literary analysis can have political relevance, and vice versa. She combines theories of authorship and authoritarianism, rhetorical concepts, and vast amounts of contextual research to explore how late 20th century autocrats frame themselves in and through books. In this, she displays both an acute sense for the minutiae of language and the ability to amalgamate globe-spanning topics into scientific writing that is as comprehensive as it is concise. Her approach is original, her results poignant, and her work never anything but impressive.
Prädikat:
sehr gut
Gymnasium Kirchenfeld, Bern
Lehrer: Dieter Fillinger
