Cultic Constructions: A Visual Construction Grammar Approach to the Cult of Personality in Fascist Italy and Communist Romania

This dissertation examines cults of personality from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Focusing on the cults of Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy (in power 1922-1943) and Nicolae Ceauşescu of communist Romania (in power 1965-1989), it offers a novel framework for understanding and accounting for longstanding observations regarding such cults’ expressly communicative nature (see e.g. Wedeen 1999; Leese 2007; Márquez 2020; Postoutenko 2022) grounded in an adaptation of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006, 2019; Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013). At its core, Construction Grammar views the entirety of language to be made up of constructions, which are understood as “conventionalized pairings of form and function” that are stored and organized in an interrelated, hierarchical, mental ‘constructional’ network (Goldberg 2006: 1). Although originally devised specifically with human language in mind, Construction Grammar has recently been applied to broader swaths of communication and semiosis beyond language ‘proper’ such as co-speech gesture, image-text configurations, and other patterns that highlight the frequently multimodal nature of human interaction (see e.g. Steen & Turner 2013; Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017a; Hoffmann 2017b, 2021; Zima & Bergs 2017a,b; Turner 2020, 2022). Aligning itself with such recent extensions, this dissertation considers cultic production (e.g. various conceptually-structured and materially-manifested representations of both Mussolini and Ceauşescu) to constitute cultic constructions that, although operating across communicative modalities, nevertheless often take shape visually in the form of images. To this end, this study explores the possibility of expanding the constructionist enterprise to include not only linguistic or multimodal but also specifically visual constructions into its theoretical apparatus.Within the present approach, such constructions are taken as the basis for all cultic semiosis and communicativity, which are here analyzed and accounted for across a range of artifacts relating to Mussolini’s and Ceauşescu’s cults – referred to here as ‘cult constructs’ – that encompass many different ‘kinds’ of cult production: official, regime-sanctioned or -produced constructs (e.g. monuments, official photographs, portraits, posters, etc.), unofficial, subversive constructs (e.g. jokes, caricatures, parodies, and ironies at the leaders’ expense), and also constructs that evince the ‘afterlives’ of both leaders’ cults (i.e. representations that appear today or have appeared in recent years, long after both cults have ceased to dominate public discourse). In this way, and in line with fundamental Construction Grammar principles, it presents a usage-based approach to cult structuration, organization, and manifestation in which cultic communication emerges dynamically both ‘from above’ and ‘from below,’ as well as in their interaction and even once the cult itself has ceased to officially ‘operate.’ Various themes central to cult communicativity are explored across this dissertation’s seven chapters. The first two chapters serve as introductions and overviews, with Chapter 1 addressing cults of personality and their communicative dimensions (as well as providing an introduction to the study as a whole) and Chapter 2 supplying a concise overview of key terms, theories, and ideas from cognitive linguistics that are deployed throughout the subsequent chapters. Chapters 3-5 then present cognitive-linguistic and constructionist analyses of particularly salient aspects of Mussolini’s and Ceauşescu’s cults, including the emergence of the multifaceted, polysemous image of both leaders within their respective cult networks (Chapter 3), the pivotal role that conceptual metonymy plays in their cults’ structuration (Chapter 4), and the peculiar manipulation and appropriation of past, present, and future time into both of their cults (Chapter 5). Throughout these chapters, various cultic constructions are posited and explained based on a range of presented (predominantly) visual data, which are often discussed and compared between the two cult contexts in question. While each of the cult constructs analyzed in Chapters 3-5 constitutes a representation of Mussolini or Ceauşescu largely disseminated ‘from above,’ Chapter 6 then highlights the dialogic nature of cult communicativity and analyzes the subversive reappropriation and redeployment of these representations ‘from below’ as instances of creative conceptual transference based in particular cultic constructions (e.g. Mussolini’s Caesarian pretensions, Ceauşescu’s so-called Epocă de Aur ‘golden age’). These redeployments are taken as evidence that, even if one might not ‘believe’ in the content of a particular cultic representation (e.g. Mussolini’s exceptional virility or Ceauşescu’s avowed ordinariness), they are still entrenched in individuals’ minds and socially conventionalized by virtue of their frequent dissemination-cum-exposure so as to (come to) constitute particular, cult-specific constructions. Such reproductions, it is argued, in taking a semantically adulating form and recasting (or, in the present framework, reblending) it as a subversive one (while still largely maintaining that same form), demonstrate the remarkable constructional polysemy that characterizes the semantic structure of personality cults as a form of what I refer to as multimodal-yet-hypervisual ‘authoritative discourse’ (Bakhtin 1994). Chapter 7 then concludes with a consideration of the two cults’ afterlives both in the immediate aftermaths of their respective leaders’ falls from power and in their continued vitality in the present day, opening up questions each into cultic communication, emergence, and evolution, into methods for researching visual and multimodal communication within cognitive linguistics at large, and into the nature of possible ‘visual constructions’ and what they might entail. Finally, it should be noted that this project in its totality presents a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to the study not only of personality cult phenomena, production, and communication but also of broader forms of visual and multimodal semiosis. That is, while the principal framework of examination is supplied by cognitive linguistics (and related disciplines such as cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy), this dissertation and its approach also draw heavily on findings and theories from anthropology, visual culture, political science, literary theory, and history. Consequently, alongside hallmark cognitive-linguistic theories such as Construction Grammar, Frame Semantics (see e.g. Fillmore 1982, 1985), Conceptual Blending Theory (see e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Turner 2014), and Conceptual Metonymy Theory (see e.g. Kövecses & Radden 1998; Barcelona, Pannain & Blanco-Carrión 2018), several other important contributions to language, communication, and semiotics such as performativity (Austin 1962), citationality (Derrida 1988), and Bakhtin’s aforementioned ‘authoritative discourse’ – and many studies that have followed in their wakes – are brought in to enrich, complement, and nuance the ‘cognitive-universal’ side of things (e.g. perception, memory, salience, usage and frequency effects, semantic frames, conceptual entrenchment, etc.) with the ‘culture-specific’ side (e.g. historical or ideological particularities, political and societal structures, various [visual-]cultural considerations, questions of media and reproduction, etc.). It is argued throughout that this kind of blended theoretical approach is essential for capturing the full potential and extent of personality cult communicativity.

Advisor: Fuller, Mia
Sweetser, Eve