Slavic Languages and Literature

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Prerequisites: BCRS UN1102 or the equivalent. Readings in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian literature in the original, with emphasis depending upon the needs of individual students.

A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; A Gentle Creature) and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Family Happiness; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required.

Poets, Rebels, Exiles examines the successive generations of the most provocative and influential Russian and Russian Jewish writers and artists who brought the cataclysm of the Soviet and post-Soviet century to North America. From Joseph Brodsky—the bad boy bard of Soviet Russia and a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, who served 18 months of hard labor near the North Pole for social parasitism before being exiled—to the most recent artistic descendants, this course will interrogate diaspora, memory, and nostalgia in the cultural production of immigrants and exiles.

Anarchy is Order!” proclaims the modern anarchist movement. The anarchist values not violence and chaos, but democracy, solidarity, and freedom from all forms of coercion. The ideal society is antiauthoritarian and decentralized, comprised of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals. In this course we will dissect these ideas, debating anarchist conceptions of freedom, authority, and human nature, beginning with late 18th-19th c. figures (Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy) and ending with more recent developments in this tradition (ecological thought, indigeneity, gender). We will engage with these ideas as expressed in political essays, but also in art (drama, poetry, visual art, fairytales, children’s literature, science fiction), and in autobiographical writing. How, we may ask, are anarchist values and critique formulated differently in these different modes of expression? What is the place of art and aesthetic experience in a radically liberatory movement? Readings will be studied in their historical contexts, especially moments of revolutionary action: across Europe in 1848, in Russia and Ukraine (1917-1921), during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), led by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico (1994-).

There are no prerequisites for this class; all readings will be available in English.

The Cold War epoch saw broad transformations in science, technology, and politics. At their nexus a new knowledge was proclaimed, cybernetics, a putative universal science of communication and control. It has disappeared so completely that most have forgotten that it ever existed. Its failure seems complete and final. Yet in another sense, cybernetics was so powerful and successful that the concepts, habits, and institutions born with it have become intrinsic parts of our world and how we make sense of it. Key cybernetic concepts of information, system, and feedback are now fundamental to our basic ways of understanding the mind, brain and computer, of grasping the economy and ecology, and finally of imagining the nature of human life itself. This course will trace the echoes of the cybernetic explosion from the wake of World War II to the onset of Silicon Valley euphoria.

 

Twenty-first century literary studies has seen a steadily growing interest in formalist literary theory. This trend has manifested in new movements, such as New Formalism, Historical Poetics, and Quantitative Formalism. This interest in formalism has been accompanied by a widely expressed desire for a better understanding of literary form, and to find ways to connect its study with cultural and political history. The archive of Russian Formalism, a protean movement which was active in the 1910s and 1920s, is a rich source for those interested in rethinking the concept of form today. Beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s, Russian Formalism was interpreted as the precursor to French Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. In this class we seek to recontextualize Russian Formalism—not in terms of the ideas of the Cold War period—but rather in light of the cultural and political milieu of revolutionary and Civil War era Russia. By connecting theories of form with the cultural and political contexts from which they emerged, our goal is to develop an understanding of form as a concept defined not only in aesthetic or linguistic terms, but also as a construct with sociopolitical import.

This class offers an introduction to Hebrew culture from a historical and literary perspective, focusing on the intersection of linguistic ideology, and literary and cultural creativity. What, we will ask, is the relationship between what people think about Hebrew and what they write in Hebrew?

We will investigate the manners in which Hebrew was imagined – as the language of God, the language of the Jews, the language of the patriarchy, the language of secularism, the language of Messianism, the language of nationalism, a dead language, a diasporic Eastern European language, a local Middle Eastern Language, ext., and how these conflicting imaginaries informed Hebrew creativity.

This class does not require prior knowledge of Hebrew. Students proficient in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, and/or European languages are encouraged to contact the instructor in advance for supplementary material in these languages.

This seminar course will provide a punctual survey of trends and figures in the experimental cultures of East Central Europe.  Formations include the avant-gardes (first, postwar, and postcommunist); experimental Modernisms and Postmodernisms; alternative film, media, and visual culture; and formally inventive responses to exceptional historical circumstances.  Proceeding roughly chronologically from early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, we will examine expressionist/surrealistic painting and drama; zenithist hybrid genres such as cinépoetry and proto-conceptualist writing; mixed-media relief sculpture; post-conceptual art; experimental and animated film; and avant-garde classical music.  In terms of theory, we will draw on regional and global approaches to artistic experimentation ranging from Marxist and other theories of value through discourses of the body and sexuality in culture to contemporary affect theory.  The course will be taught in English with material drawn primarily from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.  Each session will include a lecture followed by discussion.

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Prerequisites: POLI UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar; readings in contemporary nonfiction or fiction, depending on the interests of individual students.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN1102 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.Off-sequence

Prerequisites: RUSS UN1102 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.Off-sequence

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent, and the instructor's permission. Recommended for students who wish to improve their active command of Russian. Emphasis on conversation and composition. Reading and discussion of selected texts and videotapes. Lectures. Papers and oral reports required. Conducted entirely in Russian.

Explores the aesthetic and formal developments in Russian prose, especially the rise of the monumental 19th-century novel, as one manifestation of a complex array of national and cultural aspirations, humanistic and imperialist ones alike. Works by Pushkin, Lermonotov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Knowledge of Russian not required.

Prerequisites: RUSS V3430 or the instructor's permission. This course is designed to help students who speak Russian at home, but have no or limited reading and writing skills to develop literary skills in Russian. THIS COURSE, TAKEN WITH RUSS V3431, MEET A TWO YEAR FOREIGN LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT. Conducted in Russian.

This content-based language course is designed for students who already have an equivalent of five semesters of college-level Russian. The course aims to explore various types of Russian music that have been popular since the 1960s. Popular music expresses widely-shared trends and interests of society and evokes emotions and associations via memories. Sharing these musical associations will enhance students’ knowledge of Russian values and beliefs, and help them understand how and why these values and beliefs have changed since the thaw period, as well as how they continue to change in the 21st century in response to social mood. Students will learn how to interpret popular music and work on the development of the language skills needed to be an engaged listener of Russian music as well as an engaged partner in conversations on related topics. Learners will use language in meaningful interactions and negotiate meaning in real-life contexts. Through engagement with authentic sources, students will solidify and further develop their knowledge of the case and verbal systems as well as cause-and-effect relationships within sentences and paragraphs. They will learn how to interpret music from a cultural perspective that implies the ability to read between the lines. Conducted entirely in Russian. 

Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test. Systematic study of problems in Russian syntax; written exercises, translations into Russian, and compositions. Conducted entirely in Russian.

This course presents and examines post-Soviet Ukrainian literature. Students will learn about the significant achievements, names, events, scandals and polemics in contemporary Ukrainian literature and will see how they have contributed to Ukraine’s post-Soviet identity. Students will examine how Ukrainian literature became an important site for experimentation with language, for providing feminist perspectives, for engaging previously-banned taboos and for deconstructing Soviet and Ukrainian national myths. Among the writers to be focused on in the course are Serhiy Zhadan, Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko and Taras Prokhasko. Centered on the most important successes in literature, the course will also explore key developments in music and visual art of this period. Special focus will be given to how the 2013/2014 Euromaidan revolution and war are treated in today’s literature. By also studying Ukrainian literature with regards to its relationship with Ukraine’s changing political life, students will obtain a good understanding of the dynamics of today’s Ukraine and the development of Ukrainians as a nation in the 21st century. The course will be complemented by audio and video presentations. Entirely in English with a parallel reading list for those who read Ukrainian.