BCRS UN1101 ELEM BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN. 4.00 points.

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

BCRS UN1102 ELEM BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN. 4.00 points.

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

BCRS UN2101 INTER BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN. 4.00 points.

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

BCRS UN2102 INTER BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: BCRS UN1102 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: BCRS UN1102 or the equivalent. Readings in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian literature in the original, with emphasis depending upon the needs of individual students. This course number has been changed to BCRS 2102

BCRS GU4002 YUGOSLAV＆POST-YUGOSLAV CINEMA. 3.00 points.

This course investigates the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema. Specifically, it examines the variety of ways in which race, ethnicity, gender inequality, and national identity are approached, constructed, promoted, or contested and critically dissected in film texts from the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and its successor states (Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, FYR Macedonia). The course has four thematic units and is organized chronologically.

BCRS GU4331 ADV BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: BCRS UN2102
Prerequisites: BCRS UN2102 Further develops skills in speaking, reading, and writing, using essays, short stories, films, and fragments of larger works. Reinforces basic grammar and introduces more complete structures

BCRS GU4332 ADV BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: BCRS UN2102
Prerequisites: BCRS UN2102 Further develops skills in speaking, reading, and writing, using essays, short stories, films, and fragments of larger works. Reinforces basic grammar and introduces more complete structures

CLCZ GU4020 Czech Culture Before Czechoslovakia. 3 points.

Prerequisites: sophomore standing or the instructor's permission.

An interpretive cultural history of the Czechs from earliest times to the founding of the first Czechoslovak republic in 1918. Emphasis on the origins, decline, and resurgence of Czech national identity as reflected in the visual arts, architecture, music, historiography, and especially the literature of the Czechs.

CLCZ GU4030 POSTWAR CZECH LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original

CLCZ GU4035 THE WRITERS OF PRAGUE. 3.00 points.

After providing an overview of the history of Prague and the Czech lands from earliest times, the course will focus on works by Prague writers from the years 1895-1938, when the city was a truly multicultural urban center. Special attention will be given to each of the groups that contributed to Prague’s cultural diversity in this period: the Austro-German minority, which held disproportionate social, political and economic influence until 1918; the Czech majority, which made Prague the capital of the democratic First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938); the German- and Czech-speaking Jewish communities, which were almost entirely wiped out between 1938 and 1945; and the Russian and Ukrainian émigré community, which—thanks in large part to support from the Czechoslovak government—maintained a robust, independent cultural presence through the 1920s and early 1930s. Through close reading and analysis of works of poetry, drama, prose fiction, reportage, literary correspondence and essays, the course will trace common themes that preoccupied more than one Prague writer of this period. In compiling and comparing different versions of cultural myth, it will consider the applicability of various possible definitions of the literary genius loci of Prague

CLCZ GU4038 PRAGUE-SPRING 1968-FILM ＆ LIT. 3.00 points.

The course explores the unique period in Czech film and literature during the 1960s that emerged as a reaction to the imposed socialist realism. The new generation of writers (Kundera, Skvorecky, Havel, Hrabal) in turn had an influence on young emerging film makers, all of whom were part of the Czech new wave

CLPL GU4042 Bestsellers of Polish Literature. 3 points.

A study of the 20th-century Polish novel during its most invigorated, innovative inter-war period. A close study of the major works of Kuncewiczowa, Choromanski, Wittlin, Unilowski, Kurek, Iwaszkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and Schulz. The development of the Polish novel will be examined against the background of new trends in European literature, with emphasis on the usage of various narrative devices. Reading knowledge of Polish desirable but not required. Parallel reading lists are available in the original and in translation.

CLPL GU4040 Mickiewicz. 3 points.

The Polish literary scene that in this particular period stretched from Moscow, Petersburg, and Odessa, to Vilna, Paris, Rome. The concept of exile, so central to Polish literature of the 19th-century and world literature of the 20th will be introduced and discussed. The course will offer the opportunity to see the new Romantic trend initially evolving from classicism, which it vigorously opposed and conquered. We will examine how the particular literary form - sonnet, ballad, epic poem and the romantic drama developed on the turf of the Polish language. Also we will see how such significant themes as madness, Romantic suicide, Romantic irony, and elements of Islam and Judaism manifested themselves in the masterpieces of Polish poetry. The perception of Polish Romanticism in other, especially Slavic, literatures will be discussed and a comparative approach encouraged.Most of the texts to be discussed were translated into the major European languages. Mickiewicz was enthusiastically translated into Russian by the major Russian poets of all times; students of Russian may read his works in its entirety in that language. The class will engage in a thorough analysis of the indicated texts; the students' contribution to the course based on general knowledge of the period, of genres, and/or other related phenomena is expected.

CLPL GU4300 The Polish Novel After 1989. 3 points.

This seminar is designed to offer an overview of Post-1989 Polish prose. The literary output of what is now called post-dependent literature demonstrates how political transformations influenced social and intellectual movements and transformed the narrative genre itself. The aesthetic and formal developments in Polish prose will be explored as a manifestation of a complex phenomenon bringing the reassessment of national myths, and cultural aspirations. Works by Dorota Maslowska, Andrzej Stasiuk, Pawel Huelle, Olga Tokarczuk, Magdalena Tulli and others will be read and discussed. Knowledge of Polish not required.

CLPL GU4301 Survey of Polish Literature and Culture. 3 points.

This course introduces and explores key works, traditions, and tendencies in Polish literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present. Focusing in particular on the monuments of Polish literature, the course embeds them in historical context and places them in dialog with important ideas and trends in both Polish and European culture of their time.  The aim is to engender and establish an understanding of Poland’s position on the literary and cultural map of Europe.  In addition to literature, works of history, political science, film, and the performing arts will be drawn on for course lecture and discussion. No prerequisites. Readings in English.

CLSL UN3304 How To Read Violence: The Literature of Power, Force and Brutality from 20th Century Russia and America. 3 points.

This course seeks to understand how authors and filmmakers in the 20th century communicate the experience of violence to their audiences. We will discuss how fragmentation, montage, language breakdown and other techniques not only depict violence, but reflect that violence in artistic forms. We will also ask what representing violence does to the artistic work. Can the attempt to convey violence become an act of violence in itself? We will consider texts from Vladimir Mayakovsky, John Dos Passos, Andrei Platonov, Vasiliy Grossman, Allen Ginsberg, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Sorokin, as well as films from Sergei Eisenstein, Alexei Balabanov and Quentin Tarantino. Full course description and syllabus available at readingviolence.weebly.com.

CLSL GU4000 Hebrew: History, Politics, Culture, Literature. 3.00 points.

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

CLSL GU4003 Central European Drama in the Twentieth Century. 3 points.

Focus will be on the often deceptive modernity of modern Central and East European theater and its reflection of the forces that shaped modern European society. It will be argued that the abstract, experimental drama of the twentieth-century avant-garde tradition seems less vital at the century's end than the mixed forms of Central and East European dramatists.

CLSL GU4004 Introduction to Twentieth-Century Central European Fiction. 3 points.

This course introduces students to works of literature that offer a unique perspective on the tempestuous twentieth century, if only because these works for the most part were written in "minor" languages (Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Serbian), in countries long considered part of the European backwaters, whose people were not makers but victims of history. Yet the authors of many of these works are today ranked among the masters of modern literature. Often hailing from highly stratified , conservative societies, many Eastern and Central European writers became daring literary innovators and experimenters. To the present day, writers from this "other" Europe try to escape history, official cultures, politics, and end up redefining them for their readers. We will be dealing with a disparate body of literature, varied both in form and content. But we will try to pinpoint subtle similarities, in tone and sensibility, and focus, too, on the more apparent preoccupation with certain themes that may be called characteristically Central European.

CLSL GU4008 Slavic Avant-Garde Surfaces. 3 points.

This lecture course will provide a punctual survey of the major trends and figures in the interwar visual culture and avant-garde poetry of the Soviet Russia and East Central Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia), including the opulent field of their intersection. Topics include various interfaces of visual culture and graphic arts, such as public spaces, walls, propaganda trains, windows, postcards, posters, books, and screens. The course will address the innovative use of typography and photography, typophoto and photomontage, as well as the short written and hybrid genres such as manifesto, cinepoetry, photo essay, and photo frescoes. We will discuss poets and artists such as Mayakovsky, Lissitsky, Rodchenko, Klutsis, Vertov, Teige, Nezval, Sutnar, Štirsky, Szczuka, Stern, Themersons, Kassák, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Goll, Micić, VuÄo, Matić. Each session will include a lecture followed by discussion.

CLSL GU4010 What We Do in the Shadows: A History of the Night in Eastern Europe. 3.00 points.

This course looks at nighttime as an object of inquiry from an experiential, historical, religious, literary, and cultural perspectives, introducing the students with the growing field of night studies. It covers the Early Modern and the Modern Periods and centers primarily on Eastern Europe and East Central Europe, with a secondary focus on Jewish Literature and Culture in these regions. The course caters for students who are interested in in night studies, in the history and culture of Eastern Europe, students who are interested in Jewish (Hebrew and Yiddish) Studies, as well as students who are interested in the intersection of history and literature

CLSL GU4011 Experimental Cultures. 3.00 points.

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

CLSL GU4012 Holocaust Literature: Critical Thinking in Dark Times. 3.00 points.

How do you write literature in the midst of catastrophe? To whom do you write if you don’t know whether your readership will survive? Or that you yourself will survive? How do you theorize society when the social fabric is tearing apart? How do you develop a concept of human rights at a time when mass extermination is deemed legal? How do you write Jewish history when Jewish future seems uncertain? This course offers a survey of the literature and intellectual history written during World War II (1939-1945) both in Nazi occupied Europe and in the free world, written primarily, but not exclusively, by Jews. We will read novels, poems, science fiction, historical fiction, legal theory and social theory and explore how intellectuals around the world responded to the extermination of European Jewry as it happened and how they changed their understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual, what it means to be Jewish, and what it means to be human. The aim of the course is threefold. First, it offers a survey of the Jewish experience during WWII, in France, Russia, Poland, Latvia, Romania, Greece, Palestine, Morocco, Iraq, the USSR, Argentina, and the United States. Second, it introduces some of the major contemporary debates in holocaust studies. Finally, it provides a space for a methodological reflection on how literary analysis, cultural studies, and historical research intersect

CLSL GU4016 Socialist World Literature. 3.00 points.

This course researches the potentiality and development of a Socialist World Literature. Students will learn about the more contemporary constructions of World Literature in the West, and then look at how the Soviet Union and its satellites potentially crafted an alternative to the contemporary construction. The class will then examine whether the Soviet version addressed some of the criticism of the contemporary definitions of World Literature, particularly through addressing the colonialism and nationalism. Students will learn about the complex history of World Literature and its definitions, reading the major theorists of the concept as well as the major critics. They will also create their own arguments about World Literature in a highly-scaffolded major project due at the end of the term. All readings will be provided online

CLSL GU4017 The Central European Grotesque. 3.00 points.

Central Europe is home to large number of authors, artists, and directors who made use of the critical power of the grotesque. Beginning from the fin-de-siecle and moving to the contemporary moment, students will get to know a wide range of grotesque art from Central Europe as well as several of the critical approaches to the subject. The course should be of interest to anyone studying Central European culture, as well as students interested in cultural studies more generally. Students will learn to identify and analyze examples of the grotesque through a variety of theoretical lenses. They will also enrich their knowledge of Central European literature and culture

CLSL GU4075 POST COLONIAL/POST SOV CINEMA. 3.00 points.

The course will discuss how filmmaking has been used as an instrument of power and imperial domination in the Soviet Union as well as on post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors which exemplify the function of filmmaking as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of postcolonial theories. The course will focus both on Russian cinema and often overlooked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a «new historic community of the Soviet people» as well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and increasingly assertive ways their own counter-narratives. Close attention will be paid to the new Russian film as it re-invents itself within the post-Soviet imperial momentum projected on the former Soviet colonies

CLSS GU4101 Balkan as a Metaphor. 3 points.

This seminar for graduate and advanced undergraduate students has two main objectives. First, it is to critically assess competing and conflicting conceptions of the Balkans, Balkanism, and Balkanization. Second, it engages with border studies, a vast and thriving field that makes sense of widely different and constantly changing definitions of the border. The course’s case studies focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia across the disciplines currently recognized as the humanities and social sciences. We will examine what those disciplinary borders do to the different types of borders we have chosen to analyze. We will discuss the concepts of copy and imitation in relation to Balkan arts and politics in the contemporary globalized world. We will explore documentary film and performance art representations of how refugees, migrant minorities, and borderline populations counter marginalizations and trauma.

CLSL GU4995 Central European Jewish Literature: Assimilation and Its Discontents. 3 points.

Examines prose and poetry by writers generally less accessible to the American student written in the major Central European languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish. The problematics of assimilation, the search for identity, political commitment and disillusionment are major themes, along with the defining experience of the century: the Holocaust; but because these writers are often more removed from their Jewishness, their perspective on these events and issues may be different. The influence of Franz Kafka on Central European writers, the post-Communist Jewish revival, defining the Jewish voice in an otherwise disparate body of works.

CLRS UN3314 The Story, She Told: Women's Autofiction ＆ Life Writing in Russian. 3.00 points.

In her 1975 essay The Laughter of Medusa, Hélène Cixous compared women’s writing—in French, “écriture féminine”—to the unexplored African continent. To date, literary criticism has been grappling with the distinct qualities of literary works, crafted by women. This course offers a survey of main autofictional works and memoirs, written originally in the Russian language within the last 100 years. We will start our journey with the tumults of the WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, through the WW2, the Soviet dissident movement, the emigration waves into Israel and the United States, the advent of a post-socialist Russia in 1991—in order to arrive at the two plus decades of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. We will consider the ways in which each author transposes and conveys her own—and others’ memories—through the medium of autofiction, defined by Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term in French, as “the adventure of the language, outside of wisdom and the syntax of the novel.” All selected works, with very few exceptions, are available in English; no reading knowledge of Russian is required. No prerequisites

CLRS UN3316 Queer and Loathing: Literature, Homophobia, and Russian Identity. 3.00 points.

Over the past decade, official Russian rhetoric has posed queerness as the product of cultural and moral degradation in Western countries, framing Russia’s domestic legal homophobia and revanchist foreign policy as heroic resistance to a deformed and despotic Western sociopolitical order. According to this narrative, queer identity is a recent and unwelcome Western import to Russia, something fundamentally alien to Russianness. Our course draws together a wide array of cultural artifacts, accrued from the 19th-century up to now, which tell a starkly different story. A story of lives that defied expectation—and of the pains and pleasures that such defiance entailed. There is heroism in this story, but its ‘heroes’ often don’t fit the moniker, flouting our expectations much as they did those of their contemporaries. Spanning three centuries, and media of every kind, we will work to uncover the history of gender and sexual difference that the present Russian regime seeks to obscure and erase. What were these lives, and who were these people? How did they understand themselves, and how can we understand them today? What did they endure, what were their joys, and what did they create? In attempting to answer these questions, we will trace the cultural roots of Russia’s present-day anti-queer ideology, and consider the structures of power that have shaped its national identity. Existing scholarship will provide us with context for our readings, while critical tools drawn from feminist philosophy and queer theory help us to deepen our reflections. There are no prerequisites for this course. No knowledge of Russian is required

CLRS UN3309 Fact and Fiction: The Document in Russian and American Literature. 3 points.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain in 1897. It is an axiom more relevant today than ever before, as more and more writers draw on “true events” for their literary works. Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, goes so far as to insist that “there are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other” in contemporary literature. In this course we read works from Russian and American literature that dance along this line between fact and fiction. Sometimes called “creative non-fiction,” “literary journalism,” or “documentary prose,” these works (Sergei Tretiakov, Viktor Shklovsky, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Artem Borovik, and others) blur the boundaries between documentary evidence and literary art. No prerequisites.

CLRS GU4011 DOSTOEVSKY,TOLSTOY ＆ ENG NOVEL. 3.00 points.

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

CLRS GU4017 Chekhov [English]. 3 points.

A close reading of Chekhov's best work in the genres on which he left an indelible mark (the short story and the drama) on the subjects that left an indelible imprint on him (medical science, the human body, identity, topography, the nature of news, the problem of knowledge, the access to pain, the necessity of dying, the structure of time, the self and the world, the part and the whole) via the modes of inquiry (diagnosis and deposition, expedition and exegesis, library and laboratory, microscopy and materialism, intimacy and invasion) and forms of documentation (the itinerary, the map, the calendar, the photograph, the icon, the Gospel, the Koan, the lie, the love letter, the case history, the obituary, the pseudonym, the script) that marked his era (and ours). No knowledge of Russian required.

CLRS GU4022 Russia and Asia: Orientalism, Eurasianism, Internationalism. 3 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This course explores the formation of Russian national and imperial identity through ideologies of geography, focusing on a series of historical engagements with the concept of "Asia." How has the Mongol conquest shaped a sense of Russian identity as something destinct from Europe? How has Russian culture participated in Orientalist portrayals of conquered Asian lands, while simultaneously being Orientalized by Europe and, indeed, Orientalizing itself? How do concepts of Eurasianism and socialist internationalism, both arising in the ealry 20th century, seek to redraw the geography of Russia's relations with East and West? We will explore these questions through a range of materials, including: literary texts by Russian and non-Russian writers (Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Solovyov, Bely, Blok, Pilnyak, Khlebnikov, Planotov, Xiao Hong, Kurban Said, Aitimatov, Iskander, Bordsky); films (Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Kalatozov, Paradjanov, Mikhalkov); music and dance (the Ballets Russes); visual art (Vereshchagin, Roerich); and theoretical and secondary readings by Chaadaev, Said, Bassin, Trubetskoy, Leontievm, Lenin, and others.

CLRS GU4036 Nabokov and Global Culture. 3 points.

In 1955, an American writer of Russian descent published in Paris a thin book that forever shaped English language, American culture, and the international literary scene.  That book, of course, was Vladimir Nabokov'sLolita.

We will speak of exile, memory and nostalgia, of hybrid cultural identities and cosmopolitan elites, of language, translation and multilingualism.  All readings will be in English.

CLRS GU4037 Poets, Rebels, Exiles: 100 Years of Russians and Rusian Jews in America. 3.00 points.

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

CLRS GU4038 DOSTOEVSKY,DEMONS,DICKENS. 3.00 points.

A study of Dostoevsky and Dickens as two writers whose engagement in the here and now was vital to their work and to their practice of the novel. Readings from Dostoevsky cluster in the 1870s and include two novels, Demons (1872) and The Adolescent (1876), and selections from his Diary of a Writer. Readings from Dickens span his career and include, in addition to David Copperfield (1850), sketches and later essays.

CLRS GU4039 Chekhov and Others. 3.00 points.

We will explore Anton Chekhov’s work on its own terms, in its cultural context, and in relation to the work of others, especially Anglophone writers who responded, directly or indirectly, to Chekhov and his work. Readings by Chekhov include selected stories (short and long), his four major plays, and Sakhalin Island, his study of the Russian penal colony. There are no prerequisites. Knowledge of Russian is not required; all readings in English. Students who know Russian are encouraged to read Chekhov’s work in Russian. The course will be comparative as it addresses Chekhov on his own and in relation to anglophone writers. The course is open to undergraduates (CC, GS, BC) and graduates in GSAS and other schools. The attention to how Chekhov writes may interest students in the School of the Arts

CLRS GU4040 The Future is Red (White and Blue): Modernity and Social Justice in U.S. and U.S.S.R.. 4 points.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union and the U.S. emerged as growing world powers, offering each other two compelling, if often opposed, versions of modernity. At the same time, each country saw its intercontinental rival as an attractive, but dangerous “other”: a counterexample of the road not taken, and a foil for its own ideology and identity. From the 1920s to the heat of the Cold War, Some of the USSR’s most prominent public figures came to the U.S. and several American intellectuals, progressive activists, and officials traveled to the Soviet experiment. This course examines the cultural images of the American and Soviet “other” in the texts that resulted from these exchanges. We will read works about America from Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilya Il'f and Evgeny Petrov, and poems, essays, and novels about Russia by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Louise Bryant, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, and others. Each of these texts attempts to grapple with what it means to be modern—both technologically advanced and socially liberated—in different national contexts and under different proclaimed ideologies. 

CLRS GU4111 Narrative and Repetition: Circling in Time and Space. 3.00 points.

An introduction to central concepts in narrative theory: plot, archetype, myth, story vs. discourse, Freudian analysis, history and narrative, chronotype and personal narrative. These are explored in the context of sustained investigation of a particular plot device: the time loop. Examples come from Russian modernist fiction, Soviet and American science fiction, and film. We compare being stuck in a time loop with being lost in space - a theme found in personal narratives shared orally and online, as well as in literary fiction. Students develop a final paper topic on time loop narrative of their choice

CLRS GU4113 Impossible Worlds in Russian and English Ficiton. 3.00 points.

It is often remarked that narratives constrain. The pressure to fit knowledge to a plot structure can limit understanding. This course explores the problem of narrative structure by focusing on the storyworld. We ask, can distorting the time and space of a fictional world enable new knowledge? We consider fictions set in other places (heterotopias), stories without endings, genre hybrids, time travel, 4D space. In addition to texts, units focus on oral storytelling, and image and game based narrative. The syllabus is historical and comparative, contrasting (primarily) Russophone and Anglophone works drawn from the 19th-20th centuries. Our investigation of impossible worlds is supported throughout by readings in narrative theory. The course thus also provides an introduction to Bakhtinian, structuralist, and cognitive narrative studies. No prerequisites. All assigned reading is provided in English

CLRS GU4213 Cold War Reason: Cybernetics and the Systems Sciences. 3.00 points.

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

CLRS GU4214 The Road to Power: Marxism in Germany and Russia. 3.00 points.

Before Marxism was an academic theory, it was a political movement, but it was not led by Marx. This course examines the years in between, when a new generation began the task of building the organizations, practices, and animating theories that came to define “Marxism” for the twentieth century. Two of the most important such organizations were the German and Russian Social Democratic Parties. Responding to dramatically different contexts, and coming to equally different ends, they nevertheless developed organically interconnected. This course selects key episodes from the road to power of both parties, from their founding to the Russian Revolution— what might be called the “Golden Age” of Marxism. This course is open to all undergraduates who have completed Contemporary Civilization

CLRS GU4215 Thinking Socialism: The Soviet Intelligentsia After Stalin. 3.00 points.

While Soviet Union after the second World War is often figured as a country of “stagnation,” in contrast to the avant garde 1920s and the tumult of Stalin’s 1930s, this figure is currently being re-evaluated. Political calm belied a rapidly changing society. The period developed a Soviet culture that was indubitably educated, modern, and mass. Despite, or within, or against the ever changing and ambiguous boundaries, censors, and dogmas, Soviet intellectuals generated cultural productions that reflected upon, processed, and critiqued the reality in which they lived and created. This course examines the development of this late Soviet “intelligentsia,” the first that was fully a product of Soviet society itself. Against a background of social history, we will select developments in various realms of cultural production for further examination, which from year to year may include philosophy, literature, political culture and ideology, art, and science

CZCH UN1101 ELEMENTARY CZECH I. 4.00 points.

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

CZCH UN1102 ELEMENTARY CZECH II. 4.00 points.

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

CZCH UN2101 INTERMEDIATE CZECH I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent
Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent Rapid review of grammar. Readings in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, depending upon the interests of individual students

CZCH UN2102 INTERMEDIATE CZECH II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar. Readings in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, depending upon the interests of individual students

CZCH GU4333 READINGS IN CZECH LITERATURE I. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: two years of college Czech or the equivalent. A close study in the original of representative works of Czech literature. Discussion and writing assignments in Czech aimed at developing advanced language proficiency

CZCH GU4334 READINGS IN CZECH LITERATURE II. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: two years of college Czech or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: two years of college Czech or the equivalent. A close study in the original of representative works of Czech literature. Discussion and writing assignments in Czech aimed at developing advanced language proficiency

POLI UN1101 ELEMENTARY POLISH I. 4.00 points.

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

POLI UN1102 ELEMENTARY POLISH II. 4.00 points.

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

POLI UN2101 INTERMEDIATE POLISH I. 4.00 points.

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

POLI UN2102 INTERMEDIATE POLISH II. 4.00 points.

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

POLI GU4051 Movements in Polish Cinema. 3 points.

This course introduces and explores three separate movements in Polish post-World War II cinema – the “Polish School” of 1955–1965, the “Cinema of Moral Concern” of 1976–1981, and the “New Naïveté,” of 1999–2009. Each of these currents adopted a loosely conceived, historically specific aesthetic and ideological platform, which they sought to put into practice artistically in order to exert a therapeutic and a didactic influence on the culture and society of their time.

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• The “Polish School,” which was characterized by a blend of Italian neorealist and Polish Romantic or absurdist/existentialist styles, sought to represent and work through the national trauma of World War II in a context in which political censorship prevented the direct address of such issues. It includes the early work of world-renowned director Andrzej Wajda, as well as works by prominent filmmakers such as Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Wojciech Has.
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• The “Cinema of Moral Concern,” which drew on and combined the techniques of West European “cinemas of truth” with those of the New Hollywood, was in the forefront of the cultural ferment of the late 70s, which was devoted to the establishment of an underground civil society outside the institutions of the communist state and led up to the founding of the trade union Solidarity. It includes early work by internationally recognized filmmakers Krzysztof Kieślowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Agnieszka Holland.
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• The “New Naïveté” drew on a broad variety of Hollywood and international styles, seeking to transform the legacy of Solidarity’s anti-communist “revolution of the spirit” into contemporary forms of cultural capital in order to lay the foundations for “capitalism with a human face.” Among filmmakers active in this movement are Krzysztof Krauze, Robert Gliński, and Piotr Trzaskalski.
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Screening approximately one film a week, we will view at least five works from each movement, examining and discussing their individual formal and aesthetic principles and ideological investments, their relation to their respective movement as a whole, and their impact on the culture of their day.

POLI GU4101 ADVANCED POLISH. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: two years of college Polish or the instructor's permission. Extensive readings from 19th- and 20th-century texts in the original. Both fiction and nonfiction, with emphasis depending on the interests and needs of individual students

POLI GU4102 ADVANCED POLISH II. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: two years of college Polish or the instructors permission. Extensive readings from 19th- and 20th-century texts in the original. Both fiction and nonfiction, with emphasis depending on the interests and needs of individual students

RUSS UN1101 FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN I. 5.00 points.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation

RUSS UN1102 FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN II. 5.00 points.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation

RUSS UN2101 SECOND-YEAR RUSSIAN I. 5.00 points.

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

RUSS UN2102 SECOND-YEAR RUSSIAN II. 5.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2101 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: RUSS UN2101 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review

RUSS UN3101 THIRD-YEAR RUSSIAN I. 4.00 points.

Limited enrollment.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent, and the instructor's permission.
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

RUSS UN3102 THIRD-YEAR RUSSIAN II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent and the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent and the instructors permission. Enrollment limited. 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

RUSS UN3105 Real World Russian. 3 points.

Prerequisites: (RUSS UN2102) (department placement test)

This content-based course has three focal points: 1) communicative skills 1) idiomatic language; 3) cross-cultural awareness.

The course is designed to help students further develop all of their language skills with particular focus on communicative and information processing skills, as well as natural student collaboration in the target language. The materials and assignments that will be used in class allow to explore a broad range of social, cultural, and behavioral contexts and familiarize students with idiomatic language, popular phrases and internet memes, developments of the colloquial language, and the use of slang in everyday life.

On each class students will be offered a variety of content-based activities and assignments, including, information gap filling, role-play and creative skits, internet search, making presentations, and problem-solving discussions. Listening comprehension assignments will help students expand their active and passive vocabulary and develop confidence using natural syntactic models and idiomatic structures.

Students will be exposed to cultural texts of different registers, which will help them enhance their stylistic competence. Students will learn appropriate ways to handle linguo-social situations, routines, and challenges similar to those they come across when traveling to Russia. They will explore various speech acts of daily communication, such as agreement/disagreement, getting and giving help, asking for a favor, expressing emotions, and so forth. Part of class time will be devoted to nonverbal communication, the language of gestures, emotional phonetics and intonation.

RUSS UN3107 Russian Through Theater. 2.00 points.

Russian Through Theater is a content-based language course designed for students who already have the equivalent of two semesters of college-level Russian and want to continue exploring their path as Russian language learners. This course is experimental in that it combines elements of traditional language learning with theatricality and creativity. A stress-free learning environment will stimulate language skills and fluency. Staging skits, theatrical pieces, short at first and longer by the end of the semester, will encourage students to focus on phonetics, intonation contour, and idiomatic expressions. In addition to performing skits and short plays, the course includes various forms of improvisation. Reading, listening and speaking - these three essential skills of language learning are constantly practiced. Incorporating theater into language learning not only makes the process enjoyable but also creates a rich, immersive environment that supports language development holistically. Various performative and ludic models, offered by the theater productions -- rehearsed and improvised alike – will help students with shaping a language persona, a skill that students may use in life situations. This skill adds confidence to their conduct of language and allows to communicate effectively with limited linguistic knowledge. Classes will be conducted primarily in Russian, with sporadic instruction in English when necessary for clarification of assignments or for better understanding of terminology used during mini-lectures

RUSS UN3430 RUSSIAN FOR HERITAGE SPEAKERS. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS V3430 or the instructor's permission.
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

RUSS UN3431 RUSSIAN FOR HERITAGE SPKRS II. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS V3430 or the instructors 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 V3430, MEET A TWO YEAR FOREIGN LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT. Conducted in Russian

RUSS GU4342 FOURTH-YEAR RUSSIAN I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test.
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

RUSS GU4343 FOURTH-YEAR RUSSIAN II. 4.00 points.

FOURTH-YEAR RUSSIAN II

RUSS GU4350 Moving to Advanced-Plus: Language, Culture, Society in Russian Today. 3 points.

Prerequisites: Six semesters of college Russian and the instructor's permission.

The course is designed to provide advanced and highly-motivated undergraduate and graduate students of various majors with an opportunity to develop professional vocabulary and discourse devices that will help them to discuss their professional fields in Russian with fluency and accuracy. The course targets all four language competencies: speaking, listening, reading and writing, as well as cultural understanding. Conducted in Russian.

RUSS GU4351 Moving to Advanced-Plus: Language, Culture, Society in Russian Today. 3 points.

Prerequisites: eight semesters of college Russian and the instructor’s permission.

The course is designed to provide advanced and highly-motivated undergraduate and graduate students of various majors with an opportunity to develop professional vocabulary and discourse devices that will help them to discuss their professional fields in Russian with fluency and accuracy. The course targets all four language competencies: speaking, listening, reading and writing, as well as cultural understanding. Conducted in Russian.

RUSS GU4434 PRACTICAL STYLISTICS-RUSS LANG. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS W4334 or the equivalent or the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: RUSS W4334 or the equivalent or the instructor's permission. Prerequisite: four years of college Russian or instructor's permission. The course will focus on theoretical matters of language and style and on the practical aspect of improving students' writing skills. Theoretical aspects of Russian style and specific Russian stylistic conventions will be combined with the analysis of student papers and translation assignments, as well as exercises focusing on reviewing certain specific difficulties in mastering written Russian

RUSS GU4910 LITERARY TRANSLATION. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: four years of college Russian or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: four years of college Russian or the equivalent. Workshop in literary translation from Russian into English focusing on the practical problems of the craft. Each student submits a translation of a literary text for group study and criticism. The aim is to produce translations of publishable quality

RUSS UN3220 LITERATURE ＆ EMPIRE (19C LIT). 3.00 points.

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

RUSS UN3221 LIT ＆ REVOLUTION (20TH C LIT). 3.00 points.

The revolutionary period (1905-1938) in Russia was not only one of extreme social upheaval but also of exceptional creativity. Established ideas about individuality and collectivity, about how to depict reality, about language, gender, authority, and violence, were all thrown open to radical questioning. Out of this chaos came ideas about literature and film (just for example) which have shaped Western thought on these subjects to this day. In this course we will study a variety of media and genres (poetry, manifestos, film, painting, photomontage, the novel, theoretical essays) in an effort to gain a deep understanding of this complex and fascinating period in Russian cultural history

RUSS UN3222 TOLSTOY AND DOSTOEVSKY. 3.00 points.

Two epic novels, Tolstoys War and Peace and Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov, will be read along with selected shorter works. Other works by Tolstoy include his early Sebastopol Sketches, which changed the way war is represented in literature; Confession, which describes his spiritual crisis; the late stories Kreutzer Sonata and Hadji Murad; and essays on capital punishment and a visit to a slaughterhouse. Other works by Dostoevsky include his fictionalized account of life in Siberian prison camp, The House of the Dead; Notes from the Underground, his philosophical novella on free will, determinism, and love; A Gentle Creature, a short story on the same themes; and selected essays from Diary of a Writer. The focus will be on close reading of the texts. Our aim will be to develop strategies for appreciating the structure and form, the powerful ideas, the engaging storylines, and the human interest in the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No knowledge of Russian is required

RUSS UN3223 Magical Mystery Tour: The Legacy of Old Rus'. 3 points.

Winston Churchill famously defined Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." This course aims at demystifying Russia by focusing on the core of its "otherness" in the eyes of the West: its religious culture. We will explore an array of texts, practices and pragmatic sites of Russian religious life across such traditional divides as medieval and modern, popular and elite, orthodox and heretical. Icons, liturgical rituals, illuminated manuscripts, magic amulets, religious sects, feasting and fasting, traveling practices from pilgrimages to tourism, politcial myths and literary mystification, decadent projects of life-creation, and fervent anticipation of the End are all part of the tour that is as illuminating as it is fun. No knowledge of Russian required.

RUSS UN3230 Tricksters in World Culture: Mockery, Subversion, Rebellion. 3.00 points.

Tricksters constitute one of the universal themes or tropes in mythology and folklore of many cultures. Through the discussions of ancient Greek, Native-American, African, Paleo-Asiatic, Scandinavian, African-American, Muslim and Jewish myths and folklore about tricksters, the course will telescope the cultural functions of the comedic transgression as a form of social critique; it will also highlight cynicism, its productive and dangerous aspects. Then we’ll introduce different historical subtypes of tricksters, such as a fool, jester, holy fool, kynik, picaro, con artist, female and queer tricksters, thus moving through premodern and early modern periods. Each type of the trickster is illustrated by literary examples from different world cultures (European and non-European alike) as well as theoretical works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk. Finally, the role of the trickster in modernity will be discussed through the case of Soviet tricksters, who had become true superstars manifesting the resistance to repressive political ideology by the means of “cynical reason”. FORMAT The class consists of lectures and group discussions. On a typical week, the first class will be a lecture for all students; for the second class of the week, you will be divided into 3 sections and have separate sessions (all three at the same time in different rooms) led by Teaching Assistants. Assignments for group discussions are listed on the syllabus along with others. We will not break the class in discussion sections before Week 3. The distribution of students between discussion sections will be announced in class after the beginning of the semester. This course is a co-requisite of RUSS UN3232

RUSS GU4006 Russian Religious Thought, Praxis, and Literature. 3 points.

This course examines the interaction of religious thought, praxis, and literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Russian Empire sought to define it place in the world, many Russian writers and thinkers turned to religious experience as a source of meaning. A varied body of work emerged as they responded to the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy. The goals of this course are to acquaint students with key texts of Russian religious thought and to give students the knowledge and tools required for critical inquiry into the religious dimension of Russian literature and culture.

RUSS GU4013 Late Tolstoy (Beyond Anna Karenina): Thinker, Writer, Activist, Pacifist, Humanitarian, and Mortal. 4 points.

The focus of the course is Tolstoy's work in the last 35 years of his life. On finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy swore off the kind of literature and decided to devote himself to what he believed would be more meaningful work. This work included confessions, letters, tracts, critiques, proclamations, invectives, exposes, meditations, and gospel, and as more fiction, some of which is overly didactic and some which is, like his earlier fiction, more covertly so. 

RUSS GU4046 The Trickster in the Modern Russian Lit. 3.00 points.

“Trickster” does not simply mean “deceiver” or “rogue” (the definition of trickster according to the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary), but rather “creative idiot”, to use Lewis Hyde’s expression. This hero unites the qualities of characters who at first sight have little in common — the “selfish buffoon” and the “culture hero”; someone whose subversions and transgressions paradoxically amplify the culture-constructing effects of his (and most often it is a “he”) tricks. The trickster is a typical comic protagonist – it is enough to recollect Renard the Fox from the medieval Roman de Renard, Panurge from François Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Sanchо Panza, Beaumarchais’s Figaro, Gogol’s Khlestakov, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Yaroslav Hašek’s Švejk, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ Producers, Bart Simpson and Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen), as well as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert along with many other comical characters of the same genre – to confirm this self-evident thesis

RUSS GU4107 RUSS LIT/CULTR-NEW MILLENNIUM. 3.00 points.

Thе course examines most representative works of Russian literature and culture since the 1990s and until the present moment. While discussing recent novels, short stories, dramas, poems, and films, we will address the issues of politics, re-assessment of history, gender, family, national identity, violence and terrorism. No knowledge of Russian is expected

RUSS GU4126 Remediating Protest: Transgressive Aesthetics in Soviet ＆ Post-Soviet Culture. 3.00 points.

In the past ten years the authoritarian regime in Russia has rendered political protest exceedingly dangerous but it has not immobilized the cultural forms of dissent shaping contemporary anti-war resistance. From a feminist performance in a church to satirical documentary and whimsical trial speeches, contemporary artists, journalists, and activists have been creating the language of protest essential to understanding post-Soviet space. Why has protest in the post-Soviet region been taking these specific aesthetic forms? Taking our point of departure from Rancière’s idea of resistance – signifying both firm persistence and a practice yielding change – we will explore how contemporary post-Soviet protest genres rely on the communication strategies that return to Soviet parody, poetic form, underground art, and dissident practices of cultural distribution. Looking at laughter as a transgressive communicative device, we will search for the reverberations of Soviet satire in Russian and Belorussian stand-up, as well as in less obvious genres, such as the recent documentary work by Alexey Navalny. We will focus on mimesis as a tool of resistance in Soviet underground art and contemporary performative practices. Exploring the aesthetics of testimony rooted in Soviet show trials, we will examine how Soviet journalistic prose and, later, contemporary theater reclaimed its devices. We will study the persistence of bodily tropes and language of violence in women’s prose, drama, contemporary feminist poetry and feminist performance from Russia and Belarus. Finally, we will discuss how dissident practices of samizdat and tamizdat helped create cultural networks in Soviet Russia and beyond as we reflect on the use of new media platforms and technologies of digital activism in post-Soviet space. Rather than searching for instances of direct influence between cultural producers, we will examine how protest strategies are shaped and remediated while activating multiple layers of cultural memory. Students will learn to annotate images and videos online, write blog posts and carry out an independent research project in consultation with the instructor. At the end of the course they have a choice of presenting the project in the form of a paper or a multimedia digital piece. Enrollment is open to upper level undergraduate and graduate students. All primary and secondary readings are in English or have subtitles

RUSS GU4453 Women and Resistance in Russia. 3 points.

Cultural and political history of women and resistance in Russia, from the Putin era to medieval saints. Explores forms and specificity of female resistance in Russia across history. Addresses questions of historical narrative in light of missing sources. Material includes: prose by Svetlana Alexievich, Lydia Chukovskaya, Lidiya Ginzburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Masha Gessen, Anna Politkovskaia, and Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova; poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Sophia Parnok; films by Kira Muratova; visual art by Natalia Goncharova and fellow “amazons” of the Russia Avant Garde, together with memoirs, saint’s lives, letters, diaries, and urban legend. Final project: curating a museum exhibit.

Prerequisites: Open to undergraduate and graduate students. No Russian required for the undergraduate students. Graduate students are expected to do the readings in Russian.

RUSS UN3332 Vvedenie v russkuiu literaturu: Scary Stories. 3 points.

For non-native speakers of Russian.

Prerequisites: two years of college Russian or the instructor's permission.

The course is devoted to the reading, analysis, and discussion of a number of Russian prose fiction works from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Its purpose is to give students an opportunity to apply their language skills to literature. It will teach students to read Russian literary texts as well as to talk and write about them. Its goal is, thus, twofold: to improve the students' linguistic skills and to introduce them to Russian literature and literary history. A close study in the original of the "scary stories" in Russian literature from the late eighteenth century. Conducted in Russian.

RUSS UN3333 VVEDENIE V RUSSKUIU LITERATURU. 3.00 points.

For non-native speakers of Russian.

Prerequisites: two years of college Russian or the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: two years of college Russian or the instructor's permission. The course is devoted to the reading, analysis, and discussion of a number of Russian prose fiction works from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Its purpose is to give students an opportunity to apply their language skills to literature. It will teach students to read Russian literary texts as well as to talk and write about them. Its goal is, thus, twofold: to improve the students’ linguistic skills and to introduce them to Russian literature and literary history. In 2007-2008: A close study in the original of the “fallen woman” plot in Russian literature from the late eighteenth century. Conducted in Russian

RUSS GU4332 CHTENIIA PO RUSSKOI LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: Three years of college Russian and the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: Three years of college Russian and the instructors permission. The course is devoted to reading shorter works by Nikolai Gogol. The syllabus includes a selection of stories from Evenings at a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod, “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Overcoat,” “Nose,” and “Petersburg Tales,” and The Inspector General

RUSS GU4338 CHTENIIA PO RUSSKOI LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

The course is devoted to reading and discussing of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian.

RUSS GU4340 Chteniia po russkoi literature: Bulgakov. 3.00 points.

The course is devoted to reading and discussing of Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece Master i Margarita. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian

RUSS GU4344 ADV RUSSIAN THROUGH HISTORY. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test.
Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test. A language course designed to meet the needs of those foreign learners of Russian as well as heritage speakers who want to develop further their reading, speaking, and writing skills and be introduced to the history of Russia

RUSS GU4345 ADV RUSSIAN THROUGH HISTORY. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: three years of Russian.
Prerequisites: three years of Russian. This is a language course designed to meet the needs of those foreign learners of Russian as well as heritage speakers who want to further develop their reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills and be introduced to the history of Russia

SLCL UN3001 SLAVIC CULTURES. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

The history of Slavic peoples - Russians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, Bulgarians - is rife with transformations, some voluntary, some imposed. Against the background of a schematic external history, this course examines how Slavic peoples have responded to and have represented these transformations in various modes: historical writing, hagiography, polemics, drama and fiction, folk poetry, music, visual art, and film. Activity ranges over lecture (for historical background) and discussion (of primary sources)

SLCL UN3100 FOLKLORE PAST ＆ PRESENT. 3.00 points.

An introduction to the concept of folklore as an evolving, historical concept, and to primary source materials which have been framed as such. These are translated from Bosnian, Chukchi, Czech, Finnish, German, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Yupik languages, and others. Geographical range is from South-Eastern Europe to the Russian Far East. We learn about particular oral traditions, their social mechanisms of transmission and performance, their central themes and poetics. Attention is paid to the broader sociopolitical factors (Romantic nationalism, colonization) which have informed the transcription, collection and publication of these traditions. For the final project, students learn how to conduct an ethnographic interview, and to analyze the folklore of a contemporary social group. Our goal is to experientially understand—as folklorists and as members of folk groups ourselves—the choices entailed in transcribing and analyzing folklore

SLCL GU4002 Folklore Past and Present. 3.00 points.

This course moves from Serbia and Bosnia, to Ukraine and the Czech lands, through Poland to Russia and Finland and then on to the southern Siberian steppes and finally the Russian Far East. Along the way, the course is divided into three major thematic and theoretical units. Epics and Ballads: History, Performance, Identity Our first focus is on historical songs in the context of Romantic nationalism. We will explore why people (philologists) began to write these down, and how they were they edited and organized into print books. We discuss what these publications meant in the context of Romantic nationalist movements for political autonomy from the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. Given the stakes, some scholars were (maybe too) creative with their material. We will ask: What makes an epic text authentic, as opposed to an invented tradition, or even a fake? Throughout, we will pay attention to how traditions of oral performance were learned and transmitted within specific communities of artists, such as Ramadan performers, upper-class Bosnian women, and Ukrainian minstrels. Words in Context: Poetry, Power, Positioning Our second unit begins with the theoretical redefinition of folklore in the 20th c. Folklore is no longer defined by who performs it (e.g. peasants), but by its characteristics of variation and localization. We begin with a genre that anyone can perform—the proverb. To understand the power of small forms we need place them in their real-world context. We learn about ethnographic interviewing methods aimed at eliciting the local meanings of folklore. We consider relationship between the body and verbal folklore in south Siberian shamanism and in the performance of charms by folk healers in Russia and Finland. In order to bring the study of folklore home, to us at Columbia, we consider campus legends and folklore of the COVID-19 pandemic. This unit provides students with the tools needed to design and carry out their own mini-ethnography, which serves as the final project for the course. Oral Narrative: Legends, Fairytales, Cross-Cultural Motifs Our last major unit is dedicated to folk narrative—the memorate (personal narrative), the legend and the fairytale. We begin with Russian memorates about nature and house spirits. Narratives told as true events (memorates, legends) are contrasted with the genre of the fairy tale. We learn about how fairy tales were typically performed and collected in Russia in the 19th c., and then turn to 20th c. theoretical lenses for understanding them—structuralism and psychoanalysis (delving into the meaning of Baba Yaga, the witch living in a hut on chicken legs). In the last two weeks we consider the global spread of tales and legends. We compare variants of a tale which has been found across Eurasia, consider the role of globalization in contemporary children’s folklore, as well as the internet as a medium for sharing scary stories

HNGR GU4028 Modern Hungarian Prose in Translation: Exposing Naked Reality. 3 points.

This course introduces students to representative examples of an essentially robust, reality-bound, socially aware literature. In modern Hungarian prose fiction, the tradition of nineteenth-century "anecdotal realism" remained strong and was further enlivened by various forms of naturalism. Even turn-of-the century and early twentieth-century modernist fiction is characterized by strong narrative focus, psychological realism, and an emphasis on social conditions and local color. During the tumultuous decades of the century, social, political, national issues preoccupied even aesthetics-conscious experimenters and ivory-tower dwellers. Among the topics discussed will be "populist" and "urban" literature in the interwar years, post-1945 reality in fiction, literary memoirs and reportage, as well as late-century minimalist and postmodern trends.

HNGR GU4050 The Hungarian New Wave: Cinema in Kadarist Hungary [In English]. 3 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Hungarian cinema, like film-making in Czechoslovakia, underwent a renaissance in the 1960's, but the Hungarian new wave continued to flourish in the 70's and film remained one of the most important art forms well into the 80's. This course examines the cultural, social and political context of representative Hungarian films of the Kadarist period, with special emphasis on the work of such internationally known filmmakers as Miklos Jancso, Karoly Makk, Marta Meszaros, and Istvan Szabo. In addition to a close analysis of individual films, discussion topics will include the "newness"of the new wave in both form and content (innovations in film language, cinematic impressionism, allegorical-parabolic forms, auteurism, etc.), the influence of Italian, French, German and American cinema, the relationship between film and literature, the role of film in the cultures of Communist Eastern Europe, the state of contemporary Hungarian cinema. The viewing of the films will be augmented by readings on Hungarian cinema, as well as of relevant Hungarian literary works.

UKRN UN1101 ELEMENTARY UKRAINIAN I. 4.00 points.

Designed for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammar structures are introduced and reinforced, with equal emphasis on developing oral and written communication skills. Specific attention to acquisition of high-frequency vocabulary and its optimal use in real-life settings

UKRN UN1102 ELEMENTARY UKRAINIAN II. 4.00 points.

Designed for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammar structures are introduced and reinforced, with equal emphasis on developing oral and written communication skills. Specific attention to acquisition of high-frequency vocabulary and its optimal use in real-life settings

UKRN UN2101 INTERMEDIATE UKRAINIAN I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent. Reviews and reinforces the fundamentals of grammar and a core vocabulary from daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of communicative skills (oral and written). Verbal aspect and verbs of motion receive special attention

UKRN UN2102 INTERMEDIATE UKRAINIAN II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent. Reviews and reinforces the fundamentals of grammar and a core vocabulary from daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of communicative skills (oral and written). Verbal aspect and verbs of motion receive special attention

UKRN GU4001 Advanced Ukrainian I. 3 points.

Prerequisites: UKRN UN2102 or the equivalent.

The course is for students who wish to develop their mastery of Ukrainian. Further study of grammar includes patterns of word formation, participles, gerunds, declension of numerals, and a more in-depth study of difficult subjects, such as verbal aspect and verbs of motion. The material is drawn from classical and contemporary Ukrainian literature, press, electronic media, and film. Taught almost exclusively in Ukrainian.

UKRN GU4002 Advanced Ukrainian II. 3 points.

Prerequisites: UKRN UN2102 or the equivalent.

The course is for students who wish to develop their mastery of Ukrainian. Further study of grammar includes patterns of word formation, participles, gerunds, declension of numerals, and a more in-depth study of difficult subjects, such as verbal aspect and verbs of motion. The material is drawn from classical and contemporary Ukrainian literature, press, electronic media, and film. Taught almost exclusively in Ukrainian.

UKRN GU4006 Advanced Ukrainian Through Literature, Media, and Politics. 3.00 points.

This course is organized around a number of thematic centers or modules. Each is focused on stylistic peculiarities typical of a given functional style of the Ukrainian language. Each is designed to assist the student in acquiring an active command of lexical, grammatical, discourse, and stylistic traits that distinguish one style from the others and actively using them in real-life communicative settings in contemporary Ukraine. The styles include literary fiction, scholarly prose, and journalism, both printed and broadcast

UKRN GU4007 Advanced Ukrainian Through Literature, Media and Politics II. 3.00 points.

This course is organized around a number of thematic centers or modules. Each is focused on stylistic peculiarities typical of a given functional style of the Ukrainian language. Each is designed to assist the student in acquiring an active command of lexical, grammatical, discourse, and stylistic traits that distinguish one style from the others and actively using them in real-life communicative settings in contemporary Ukraine. The styles include literary fiction, scholarly prose, and journalism, both printed and broadcast

UKRN GU4033 FIN DE SIECLE UKRAINIAN LIT. 3.00 points.

The course focuses on the emergence of modernism in Ukrainian literature in the late 19th century and early 20th century, a period marked by a vigorous, often biting, polemic between the populist Ukrainian literary establishment and young Ukrainian writers who were inspired by their European counterparts. Students will read prose, poetry, and drama written by Ivan Franko, the writers of the Moloda Muza, Olha Kobylianska, Lesia Ukrainka, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko among others. The course will trace the introduction of feminism, urban motifs and settings, as well as decadence, into Ukrainian literature and will analyze the conflict that ensued among Ukrainian intellectuals as they shaped the identity of the Ukrainian people. The course will be supplemented by audio and visual materials reflecting this period in Ukrainian culture. Entirely in English with a parallel reading list for those who read Ukrainian

UKRN GU4037 SOV UKRAINIAN MODERNISM: REV, REB, EXPER. 3.00 points.

This course studies the renaissance in Ukrainian culture of the 1920s - a period of revolution, experimentation, vibrant expression and polemics. Focusing on the most important developments in literature, as well as on the intellectual debates they inspired, the course will also examine the major achievements in Ukrainian theater, visual art and film as integral components of the cultural spirit that defined the era. Additionally, the course also looks at the subsequent implementation of the socialist realism and its impact on Ukrainian culture and on the cultural leaders of the renaissance. The course treats one of the most important periods of Ukrainian culture and examines it lasting impact on today's Ukraine. This period produced several world-renowned cultural figures, whose connections with the 1920s Ukraine have only recently begun to be discussed. The course will be complemented by film screenings, presentations of visual art and rare publications from this period. Entirely in English with a parallel reading list for those who read Ukrainian

UKRN GU4054 CREATING ID-CONTEMP UKRN CULTR. 3.00 points.

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