Courses

Comparative Literature-Czech [CLCZ]

GU4020. Czech Culture before Czechoslovakia. 3 pts. C. Harwood
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.

GU4030. Postwar Czech Literature. 3 pts. C. Harwood
A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original.

GU4035. The Writers of Prague. 3 pts. C. Harwood
Readings in English. A survey of the Czech, German and German-Jewish literary cultures of Prague from 1910 to 1930. Emphasis on Hašek, Čapek, Kafka, Werfel, and Rilke.

GU4038. Prague Spring of '68 In Film and Literature. 3 pts. C. Harwood
The course explores the unique period in Czech film and literature during the 1960's 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.

Comparative Literature - Polish [CLPL]

GU4040. Mickiewicz. 3 pts. C. Caes.
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.

GU4042. Bestsellers of Polish Literature 4 pts. C. Caes
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.

GU4120. The Polish Short Story In a Comparative Context. 3 pts. C. Caes
The course examines the beginnings of the Polish short story in the 19th century and its development through the late 20th century, including exemplary works of major Polish writers of each period. It is also a consideration of the short story form--its generic features, its theoretical premises, and the way these respond to the stylistic and philosophical imperatives of successive periods.

GU4300. Unbound and Post-Dependent: The Polish Novel After 1989. 3pts. C. Caes
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 reassesment 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.

Comparative Literature-Russian [CLRS]

GU4011. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the English Novel. 3 pts. L. Knapp.
Novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy will be read in conjunction with English ones. We read three novels of coming of age in Russia and England (Bronte’s Jane Eyre; Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova; Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth), then turn to multiplot novels of love and death (Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; Eliot’s Middlemarch; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and end with novels by Virginia Woolf, read “from the Russian point of view” (Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse). Knowledge of Russian is not required.

GU4036. Nabokov & Global Culture. 3 pts. V. Izmirlieva
In 1955, an American writer of Russian descent published in Paris a thin book that forever changed English language, American culture, and the international literary scene. That book, of course, was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In less than a decade, the novel had become a highly successful movie and a household name, “lolita” had entered transnational language, and Nabokov had become the most famous writer alive. This lecture course will begin with the novel (and films) that made Nabokov famous, then move back in time to trace the origins of the international literary legend in the young Russian émigré fleeing the Revolution. We will end our journey with a number of literary works, social concepts, artifacts, and cultural phenomena inspired by Nabokov, from Simone de Beauvoir’s Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the Japanese “lolita” fashion craze to Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. 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.

GU4038. Dostoevsky in the 1870s: Demons, Diary of a Writer, Adolescent, and Dickens. 3pts. L. Knapp.
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. Reading from Dostoevsky cluster in the 1870s and include two novels, Demons (1872) and Adolescent (1876), and selections from his Diary of a Writer. Readings from Dickens span his career and include, in addition to David Copperfield (1850), sketched and later essays. 

GU4107. Russian Literature and Culture in the New Millennium. 3pts. M. Lipovetsky
Survey of Russian literature and culture from the late 1970s until today. Works by Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, Tolstaya, Sorokin, Ulitskaya, Akunin, Rubinshtein, Prigov, Vasilenko, and others. Literature, visual art, and film are examined in social and political contaxt. Knowledge of Russian not required.

GU4111. Narrative and Repetition: Circling in Time and Space. 3 pts. J. Merrill
An introduction to central concepts in narrative theory: plot, archetype, myth, story vs. discourse, Freudian analysis, history and narrative, chronotope, and personal narrative. These are explored in the context of a 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 a time loop narrative of their choice.

GU4112. Decadent Desires and the Russian Silver Age. 3 pts. V. Shkolnikov
The late nineteenth-century culture of “decadence” marks the moment when European literature and art decisively turn to the dark side.  Decadence loves to depict depravity and deviant behavior; it revels in sensuality, eroticism, libertinism, and immoralism; the aesthetics of madness and intoxication abound.  In this course we will explore how these decadent tendencies shaped the elegant and transgressive literary culture of Russia’s pre-revolutionary Silver Age.  The decadent predilection for self-destructive behavior and the pervasive sense of impending doom took on new meaning within the Russian cultural context, on the eve of the communist revolution.

GU4113. Impossible Worlds in Russian and English Fiction. 3 pts. J. Merrill
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.

GU4191. A Specter Haunting Europe: Radical Thought from the French Revolution to the Russian. 3 pts. A. Leeds 
This course is an introduction to radical thought in Europe across the long nineteenth century from the French to the Russian revolutions. This period marks the entrance of the lower orders onto the political stage—and not merely in moments of revolt, but as a permanent presence around which politics and government subsequently must needs orient, and not merely to be recorded in the texts of their aristocratic enemies, but as inspiring and expositing their own political doctrines. Nineteenth century political thought is usually reduced to a list of liberal authors, with the exception of Marx, whose work then stands in for all of radicalism. But in this course we will study a variety of seldom read texts by often forgotten radical democratic, socialist, and anarchist writers from France, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia. Readings may be drawn from the writings of such figures as Babeuf and the Enragés, Proudhon, Saint-Simon and his followers, Hess, Feuerbach, Owen and popular political economy, the Chartists, Blanqui, Russian populists and terrorists, Bakunin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bernstein, and Lenin. This class is open to graduate students, who will also be expected to read and engage with secondary literature, and any undergraduate who has taken a class in political thought (such as Contemporary Civilization).

GU4213. Cold War Reason: Cybernetics and the Systems Sciences. 3 pts. A. Leeds
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.

GU4214. The Road to Power: Marxism in Germany and Russia. 3 pts. A. Leeds
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.

GU4215. Thinking Socialism: The Soviet Intelligentsia After Stalin. 3pts. A. Leeds.
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.

GR6110. The Discourse of Self in Russia and the West. 4 pts. Staff
The evolution of self-narrative in Russian literature, including both fiction and non-fiction, in comparison with canonical Western texts. Emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical tensions inherent in the project of self-narration, the ways in which major Russian and Western authors addressed these problems, and parallels between personal and national self-definition.

GR6111. Russian Formalism. 4pts. J. Merrill
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.

GR6132. Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their French, English, and American Precursors. 4pts. L. Knapp
This seminar explores the relations between the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the nineteenth-century English, French, and American novels that the Russian novelists responded to as they adapted the form to their Russian reality and vision. Novels are clustered by type (the social problem novel, the novel of the city, novels about wars against Napoleon and his spirit, the political novel, the Bildungsroman, the novel of adultery). non-Russian novelists include: Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Sue (French); Ch. Bronte, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Thackeray (English); Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne (American). Students may read Russian and French works in English translation.

GR6133. Novels of War and of Peace. 4 pts. L. Knapp
We will read a range of fictional works, mostly novels, about war and about peace, written by Russian, U.S., English, French, and German authors between 1837 and 1969.  Anchoring the course will be Leo Tolstoy’s early and late war (and anti-war) stories and his epic novel.

GR6201. Bakhtin. 4 pts. Staff
An examination of the literary and cultural theory of Mikhail Bakhtin.
 

Comparative Literature-Slavic [CLSL]

GU4000. Hebrew: History, Politics, Culture, Literature. 3 pts. O. Dynes
This course 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? 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.

GU4009. Hegel: State, History, Freedom. 3 pts. Leeds
This course is an advanced introduction to the reading of Hegel, via selections from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and The Philosophy of Right. The focus will be on Hegel’s philosophy of history, his understanding of modernity and its particular kind of freedom, and the way that he saw that freedom to be actualized in the modern state. Prerequisite: undergraduates ought to have finished the core curriculum and taken at least one other philosophy class; at least one of PHIL 2201, 2301, or 3251 is highly recommended.

GU4010. What We Do in the Shadows: A History of the Night in Eastern Europe. 3 pts. O. Dynes
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. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the following questions: What do we learn about society when we look at the night, rather than the day? What sources allow us to write a nocturnal history? How does a focus on nighttime contribute to our understanding of EasternEuropean history? - How does the focus on Eastern Europe contribute to our understanding of the history of the night?

CLSL GU4012. Holocaust Literature: Critical Thinking in Dark Times. 3pts. O. Dynes.
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.

GU4025. Literature and Ideology: Balkan Modernism. 3 pts. Valentina Izmirlieva
A survey of the twentieth-century literature of Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania, and Romania (in translation), with a focus upon the role of literature in modern Balkan politics. The course explores “the Balkans” – the cultural entity, the political phenomenon, the ideological construct – from the vantage point of the best modernist and postmodernist texts created in the region. The reading list includes poetry by Constantine Cavafy, novels by Ivo Andric and Ismail Kadare, short-stories by Danilo Kis read in conjunction with his fathers by choice, Jorge Luis Borges and Bruno Schultz, films by two of Europe’s most acclaimed directors of the 1990s: Emir Kusturica and Theo Angelopolus.

GU4075. Soviet and Post Soviet, Colonial and Post Colonial Film. 3 pts. Y. Shevchuk.
The course will discuss how film making has been used as a vehicle of power and control in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors that exemplify the function of film making as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of post-colonial theories. The course will also focus on the often over looked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of forstering as well as resisting it.

GU4101 Balkan as a Metaphor. A. Boskovic
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.

GR6200. Muslim/Christian in Balkan Narratives. 4 pts. V. Izmirlieva
This course explores the tangled relations of Muslims and Christians in the Balkans through the stories they tell of each other and the foreign narratives about themselves that they import, absorb, and resist. The course defines "narrative" broadly and probes creative storytelling across media and genres, asking methodological questions about narration and narrative inquiry and developing students' skills for reading both narrative texts and the complex social contexts that produce and sustain them. Its introductory part, "Cities of the Book: Geographies of Conflict and Coexistence," will familiarize students with the region through case studies of three cities that have served as symbols of Balkan conflict and convivencia: Sarajevo, Thessaloniki, and Istanbul. The second part, "(Broken) Mirrors and Bridges (to Nowhere)," focuses on four novels by highly visible fiction writers from the region (Pamuk, Pavić, Andrić, and Kadare). In the third part, "My Neighbor, My Enemy," students—drawing from a range of heterogeneous narratives—are invited to consider whether Muslim-Christian violence is indeed inevitable, how interreligious hatred can be countered, and what effective strategies exist for cultivating "neighborliness" in multi-religious societies. No knowledge of Balkan languages required.

GR6201. The Culture of Kyivan Rus'. 4 pts. V. Izmirlieva
The culture of Kyivan Rus’ (10^th-13^th c.) has been violently contested and rewritten for centuries, and debates about its fundamental texts have shaped the ways we study Ukrainian and Russian literatures, Slavic history, and the politics of Soviet and post-Soviet worlds. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced these disciplines to reexamine their own assumptions. This seminar trains students to read critically both the primary sources of Kyivan Rus’ and the histories of their political and scholarly interpretation. The course is primarily addressed to graduate students with a research focus on Ukraine, Russia, and the post-Soviet political space. Students will be challenged to develop basic hermeneutic skills for reading medieval texts in their specific cultural and historical contexts. All works will be made available in both Old Slavic original and modern English translation, and students are encouraged to read and discuss them in parallel. Graduate students of Russian and Ukrainian literatures who take the course to meet the medieval requirement are expected to pass a final comprehensive exam.

GR8020-G8021. Directed Research In Slavic Cultures. 3 pts. 
Departmental permission.

Czech [CZCH]

GU4333. Readings in Czech Literature I. 3 pts. C. Harwood.
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.

GU4334. Readings in Czech Literature II. 3 pts. C. Harwood.
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.

GR8001-GR8003. Directed Research in Czech Literature. 3-4 pts. Staff

History [HIST]

GU4280. Religion in Russia: Culture, History, Institutions. 3 points. V. Izmirlieva
From Prince Valdimir's Rus' to the Post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin, religion has remained a key factor in the making and remaking of Russian polity and culture. This course will explore how Orthodox Christianity - whether privileged or persecuted - came to dominate the Russian religious scene, while also addressing the share of Islam, Judaism, Catholicism, and other religious traditions in shaping Russian institutions, discourses and lived experiences. Popular religion, cutting across various confessions and producing peculiar hybrids, will be of special interest, and so will be the proliferations of schisms within established religious groups. Students will draw from a variety of primary and secondary sources - chronicles, saints' lives, travel narratives, memoirs, letters, legal documents, icons and other ritual objects, newspaper accounts and photographs, films and fiction texts, as well as a large body of scholarly works - to examine how Russia's religious past and its rewriting into competing "histories" have been used over time as "legacies" shaping the present and the future. Knowledge of Russian is not required, although ability to consult original Russian sources is expected from students who pursue a degree in Russian history or Russian literature and culture.

GR6000. Creative Dissidence in Post Stalin Period. 4 pts. Staff.
This course surveys primary texts of the Soviet literary and artistic dissidence during the post-Stalin period, placing aesthetic praxis in dialogue with the theory and practice of human rights both in their historical development as they are currently construed. Readings will focus on literary texts and memoirs produced during the late Soviet period, most of which were denied publication in their country of origin. Important dissident events performed in other art forms, including the fine arts, music, architecture, and cinema will also be considered.

GR8445. Legacies of Empire and the Soviet Union. 4 pts. Staff

 

Slavic and General Linguistics [SLLN, CLLN, LING]

Slavic Linguistics

SLLN GR8020-G8021. Directed Research in Slavic Linguistics. 3 pts. Staff

General Linguistics

GU4108. Language History. 3 pts. Staff.
Prerequisites: LING W3101. Language, like all components of culture, is structured and conventional yet can nevertheless change over time. This course examines how language changes, firstly as a self-contained system that changes organically and autonomously, and secondly, as contextualized habits that change in time, in space, and in communities.

GU4171. Languages of Africa. 3 pts. J. McWhorter
The African continent is home not to simply a collection of similar "African dialects," but to at least 1000 distinct languages that belong to five language families, none of them any more closely related than English and its relatives are to Japanese. This includes the Semitic languages that emerged in the Middle East and are now most commonly associated with Arabic and Hebrew, the famous "click" languages of Southern Africa whose origins are still shrouded by mystery, and in the case of Malagasy on Madagascar, the Austronesian family of Southeast Asia and Oceania - the language traces to speakers who travelled over the ocean from Borneo to Africa. This course will examine languages in all of these families, with a focus on how they demonstrate a wide array of linguistic processes and how they interact with social history, anthropology, and geography.

GU4174. Languages of Asia. 3 pts. R. Perlin
With the largest landmass of any continent and a majority of the world's population, Asia is deeply diverse linguistic terrain, where even the major national languages may come from very different families and employ varied writing systems. Though many are endangered and little documented, Asia's 2,000-plus languages exemplify both feathures that are typologically significant worldwide such as tone, ergativity, evidentiality, and normalization, and more particulary local feathures including vowel harmony, retroflexion, elaborate expressions, and sentence-final particles. This course surveys four of Asia's major language groups (indo-Iranian, Turkic, Tibeto-Burman and Sinitic) and four of its proposed linguistic areas (the Caucasus, India, mainland Southest Asia, and Northeast Asia), where a constellation of languages from a variety of families, as well as isolates, have long been in close contact. Representative languages large and small will be examined in "close-up" for both their linguistc feathure and the natural, social, and historical forces that shape them.

GU4190. Discourse and Pragmatics. 3 pts. Staff
Prerequisite: LING UN3101. How discourse works, how language is used: oral vs. written modes of language, the structure of discourse, speech acts and speech genres, the expression of power, authenticity, and solidarity in discourse, dialogicity, pragmatics, mimesis.

GU4202. Cognative Linguistics. 3pts. Staff
Prerequisite: LING UN3101, previously or concurrently. Reading and discussion of scholarly literature on the cognitive approach of language, including: usage oriented approaches to language, frame semantics, construction grammar, theories of conceptual metaphor and mental spaces; alongside of experimental research on language acquisition, language memory, prototypical and analogous, and the role of visual imagery in language processing.

GU4376. Phonetics and Phonology. 3 pts. Staff
Prerequisite: LING UN3101. An investigation of the sounds of human language, from the perspective of phonetics (articulation and acoustics, including computer-aided acoustic analysis) and phonology (the distribution and function of sounds in individual languages).

GU4800 Language and Society. 3 pts. Staff
Prerequisite: LING UN3101. How language structure and usage and varies according to special factors such as social history and socioeconomic factors, illustrated with study modules on language contact, language standardization and literacy, quantitative sociolinguistic theory, and the history, present and future of language usage in the former Soviet Union.

GU4903. Syntax. 3 pts. Staff
Prerequisite: LING UN3101. Syntax - the combination of words - has been at the center of the Chomskyan revolution in Linguistics. This course examines contemporary syntactic theories, focusing on later versions of generative syntax (Government and Binding, Minimalism), with secondary attention to alternative models (HPSG< Categorial Grammar).

Polish [POLI]

GU4040. Mickiewicz. 3 pts. C. Caes
The major works of Adam Mickiewicz. Students with sufficient knowledge of Polish are required to do the readings in the original. Parallel reading list for readers and non-readers of Polish.

GU4042. Bestsellers of Polish Prose: Literature and Film. 3 pts. C. Caes
A close study of the twentieth-century Polish novel during the prewar period. Readings from major works of Kuncewiczowa, Choromański, 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 and film, and the use of various narrative devices will be studied. A reading knowledge of Polish is desirable but not required.

GU4110. The Polish Novel. 3 pts. Staff.
A consideration of the evolution of the novel form in Polish literature from the Baroque memoir through the Enlightenment, Positivism, modernism, and the avant-gardists of the Twentieth Century. Reading knowledge of Polish desirable but not required. Papers and discussion in English.

GR8001-GR8002. Directed Research in Polish Literature. 3-4 pts. Staff

Russian [RUSS]

GU4006. Modern Russian Religious Thought. 3 pts. L. Knapp
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.

GU4014. Introduction To Russian Poetry and Poetics. 3 pts. Staff.
An introduction to Russian poetry, through the study of selected texts of major poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily: Pushkin, Lermontov, Pavlova, Tiutchev, Blok, Mandel'shtam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Brodsky. Classes devoted to the output of a single poet will be interspersed with classes that draw together the poems of different poets in order to show the reflexivity of the Russian poetic canon. These classes will be organized according either to types of poems or to shared themes. The course will teach the basics of verisification, poetic languages (sounds, tropes), and poetic forms. Classes in English; poetry read in Russian.

GU4039. Literature, Politics, and Tradition After Socialist Realism. 3 pts. Staff
The major writers and trends in Russian literature from the death of Stalin to the present. Emphasis on the rethinking of the role of literature in society and on formal experimentation engendered by relaxation of political controls over literature. A knowledge of Russian is not required.

GU4046. The Trickster in the Modern Russian Literature and Culture. 3pts. M. Lipovetsky
“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.

GU4107. Russian Literature and Culture in the New Millennium. 3pts. M. Lipovetsky.
Survey of Russian literature and culture from the late 1970s until today. Works by Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, Tolstaya, Sorokin, Ulitskaya, Akunin, Rubinshtein, Prigov, Vasilenko and others. Literature, visual art, and film, are examined in social and political context.

GU4155. History of Russian & Soviet Film. 3 pts. Staff. 
This course surveys developments in Russian film history and style from the prerevolutionary beginnings of cinema through the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. We will be studying both the aesthetic qualities of the films and their historical and cultural contexts. Students will be exposed to a wide range of visual media, including experimental films of the 1920s, films on Russia's experience of World War II, Soviet classics, late Soviet and contemporary Russian films. Readings will include theoretical articles and selections from Russian film history and criticism. All readings are in English and the films will be screened with English subtitles

GU4331. Chteniia po russkoi literature: Turgenev. 3 pts. I. Reyfman.
The course is devoted to reading and discussing the works of Ivan Turgenev. Taught entirely in Russian.

GU4332. Chteniia po russkoi literature: Gogol. I. Reyfman.
The course is devoted to reading of representative works of Nikolai Gogol. Taught entirely in Russian, it requires reading of Gogol's stories and a play, discussing them in class, and writing a number of short analytical essays about these texts, it does allow students to familiarize themselves with some of the most important Gogol's works as well as to improve their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. 

GU4338. Chteniia po russkoi literature: Voina i mir. 3 pts. I. Reyfman.
The course is devoted to reading and discussing of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian.

GU4340. Chteniia po russkoi literature: Mikhail Bulgakov Master i Margarita. 3 pts. M. Lipovetsky
The course is devoted to reading and discussing of Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece Master i Margarita. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian.The course is devoted to reading and discussing of Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece Master i Margarita. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian.

GU4344. Chteniia po russkoi kul'ture: Advanced Russian Through History: 19 Century to the Present. 3pts. Staff. A language course designed to meet the needs of those non-heritage and heritage learners of Russian who want to develop further their reading, speaking and writing skills and to be introduced to the history of Russia. Prerequisite: completion of UN3101-UN3102 or placement test

GU4345. Chteniia po russkoi kul'ture: Advanced Russian Through History: 9 – 18 Centuries. 3pts. Staff. A language course designed to meet the needs of those non-heritage and heritage learners who want to further develop their reading, speaking, and writing skills and be introduced to the history of Russia. Prerequisite: completion of UN3101-UN3102 or placement test

GU4346. Chteniia po russkoi kul'ture: Russian Folklore and the Folkloric Tradition. 3 pts. Staff.
Prerequisites: Three years of college Russian and the instructor's permission.  Reading and discussion of the principal genres of traditional and contemporary Russian folklore and readings about Russian folk customs. Conducted in Russian.

GU4350 Language, Culture, Society in Russia Today. Prerequisite: Completion of UN3102 or placement test.

GU4432. Contrastive Phonetics and Grammar of Russian and English. 3 pts. Staff
Prerequisite: four years of college Russian and instructor’s permission. Comparative phonetic, intonational, and morphological structures of Russian and English, with special attention to typical problems for American speakers of Russian.

GU4433. Specific Problems in Mastering and Teaching Russian. 3 pts. Staff
Prerequisite: four years of college Russian and instructor’s permission. The Russian verb (basic stem system, aspect, locomotion); prefixes; temporal, spatial, and causal relationships; word order; word formation.

GU4434. Practical Stylistics [in Russian]. 3 pts. I. Reyfman.
Prerequisite: Four years of college Russian or the equivalent. Practice in the varieties of narrative and expository writing. Development of vocabulary and syntactic structures appropriate for abstract discourse.

GU4453. Women and Resistance in Russia. 3 pts. V. Izmirlieva
​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.

GU4910. Literary Translation. 3 pts. R. Meyer
Prerequisite: 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 of the class is to produce translations of publishable quality. May count as a literature course for the M.A. or Ph.D. degree.

GR6005. From Lermontov to Nadson: Russian Poetry in the Age of Realism.  4 pts. Staff. Beginning in the 1830s, the emergence of a philosophy of national identity, a new emphasis on socio-economic problems, and the rise of a new literary genre later dubbed the "realist novel" threatened to marginalize poetry, which had played a pivotal role in the development of culture and language in the course of several preceding decades. The seminar will start with the efforts of poets as diverse as the late Pushkin, Baratynsky, and Lermontov to respond, each in his own way, to the advent of an "iron age." It will then proceed to the epoch of "metaphysical poetry" (Tiutchev and Fet), through the age of heightened social consciousness (Nekrasov), to a variety of "metapoetic" voices in the 1880s (Polonsky, Nadson, Myra, Lokhvitskaya) that presage the beginnings of Symbolism. 

GR6009. Gogol. 4 pts. I. Reyfman
A close study in the original of the major works.

GR6011 Literature, Politics, and Tradition After Stalin. 4pts. M. Lipovetsky
The seminar’s main goal is to introduce graduate students to the wealth of Russian literature from the period of the late 1950s to the late 1980s, i.e. since Stalin’s death to Gorbachev’s Perestroika. The process of de-Stalinization triggered radical transformations of the entire Soviet discursive field resulting in the emergence of several warring cultural formations, each of which had its own vision of Russia’s history and culture. Since literature traditionally played a leading role in Russian culture, it became the field where main political and historical conflicts took place. From this perspective, we will discuss main tendencies in Russian literature that developed simultaneously, albeit on parallel courses, during these years: literature published in Soviet press and literature distributed through unofficial channels. The latter segment of literature frequently transformed into a third parallel stream under discussion: literature of emigration. 

GR6012. Russian Modernist and Postmodernist Novel. 4pts. M. Lipovetsky
The course will examine several theories of the novel influential in Russia through their application to Russian novels of 20 th - 21st century. The main purpose of the course is not only to familiarize students with major theoretical approaches to the genre, as well as to teach to use the theoretical models as tools for the practical analysis of a literary text. This course will develop a vision of the novel as a discursive metaphor for modernity. The evolution of novelistic form and the variety of its modifications will be read as a pattern of the modern worldview and world-construction. Among the theories, the main emphasis will be paid to Formalist theory (Shklovsky and his circle), Bakhtin’s theories of the carnival, chronotope, and the polyphonic novel, and Lukacs’ version of the Marxist aesthetics.

GR6032. Russian Modernism (aka Modernist Russian Prose). 4 pts. Staff
A knowledge of Russian is not required.  The major writers and trends of Russian modernism, set in cultural context (alongside music, art, and politics), with an emphasis on prose fiction. Garshin, Kuprin, Andreev, Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Bunin, Remizov, and others.  (Ph.D. students in Russian literature should be prepared to read in the original.)

GR6039. Literature, Politics and Tradition after Stalin. 4 pts. Staff
A knowledge of Russian is not required. The major writers and trends in Russian literature from the death of Stalin to the present. Emphasis on the rethinking of the role of literature in society and on formal experimentation engendered by relaxation of political controls over literature.  (Ph.D. students in Russian literature should be prepared to read in the original.)

GR6040. Eighteenth Century Russian Literature. 4 pts. I. Reyfman.
A survey of eighteenth century Russian poetry, prose and drama in the original. The reading list includes Feofan Prokopovich, Vasily Trediakovsky, Mikhailo Lomonosov, Alexsandr Sumarokov, Alexsandr Radishchev, Gavrila Derzhavin, and Nikolai Karamzin.

GR6041. Contemporary Russian Culture and Society. 4 pts. Staff.
"Contemporary Russian Culture and Society" examines major topics in present day Russian culture (literary (prose and poetry); language; philology and literary criticism; theater; cinema; architecture; childhood and education). This graduate seminar will be conducted in Russian; texts in various genres will be read and discussed; also included will be projects, film screenings, and guest lectures.

GR6043. Russian Poetry and Poetics in the 1920s. 4pts. Staff.
The course explores the cultural phenomena of the 1920s. Poetic texts by Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhamtova, Vladimir Maiakovsky, Boris Pasternak, and nikolai Zabolotsky - will be examined alongside with the major writings of Russian Formalists (Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Grigorii Gukovsky), as well as juxtaposed with contemporary art and architecture. This graduate semiar will be conducted in English.

GR6044. Developing Academic Discourse: How to Talk About Your Research in Russian. 4pts. A. Smyslova.
This language course is designed to provide those MA and PhD students who want to be able to present and discuss their research in Russian with an opportunity to develop discipline-specific vocabulary and syntax that are typical of the Russian academic discourse. The course targets mostly productive language skills in both oral and written modes and is conducted in Russian.

GR6045. Actually Existing Socialism: Late Soviet Culture and Society. 4 pts. A. Leeds.
In the wake of the Second World War, the Soviet Union for the first time knew itself to be strong enough to survive in a hostile world. And not only survived but, defying enemy’s expectations that only Stalin’s “totalitarian” terror prevented collapse, thrived, evolving into a unique form of life: actually existing socialism. This seminar surveys the social worlds and cultural imaginaries of the post-War period, a period only just beginning to be seriously examined by historians and to receive synthetic conceptualizations. Doing so will be our task. We will steer a course between social and intellectual history, between mass consumption and high culture, to examine multiple sites of the evolution of Soviet society—education, youth culture, consumption, mass media, criminality, underground literature, unofficial art, science, etc. We will aim to theorize the multiplying positions that Soviet citizens could construct and enact with respect the changing world they lived in and the—constantly redacted, regimented but irreducibly polysemic—communist project by which it patterned, measured, and legitimated itself.

GR6104. Old Russian Literature. 4 pts. V. Izmirlieva
A survey of the principal genres of original and translated literature, with class readings and explication of assigned texts.

GR6105. Old Russian Literature II. 4 pts. V. Izmirlieva
Surveys major works of the Russian literary cannon, from the late Muscovite period through the seventeenth century. Emphasis on the rhetoric of empire and Muscovite imperial ideology, the emergence of literary subjectivity and the transformation of medieval genres. No knowledge of Old Church Slavonic is required, but good reading comprehension of Russian is a must.

GR6119. Eighteenth-Century Russian Poetry. 4 pts. I. Reyfman
A survey of Russian poetry from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

GR6120. Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry. 3 pts. Staff
The major themes and modes of Russian poetry from preromanticism up to “pure art.” Selections from Batiushkov, Zhukovsky, Baratynsky, Yazykov, Lermontov, Tiutchev, Karolina Pavlova, Nekrasov, and Fet.

GR6131. Twentieth-Century Poetry. 3pts. Staff
This course offers a historical survey of the Russian novel in the epoch of modernism, from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1970s. The theoretical focus of the course concerns the evolution of modernist aesthetic, and the way this process was reflected in fundamental features of the genre and their transformation. While this course is focused on novels of Russian modernism, each work of Russian literature is considered alongside its Western counterpart or counterparts. It belongs to strategic aims of the course to show Russian twentieth-century literature as an integral part of modernism at large and its historical developments.

GR6140. The Classic Russian Novel. 4 pts. L. Knapp
Selected novels of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky will be read closely, with special attention to the development and flowering of the Russian novel, to the question of what a novel is (in the Russian context), and to the cultural work of these novels. Readings will also include seminal works of criticism, selected works on the theory of the novel, and additional novels from the Russian and European traditions that are relevant to the novels studied in the course. Students must be able to read the major texts in Russian.

GR6141. Modes of Self-Expression: Women’s Autobiographical Prose in 18^th and 19^th Century Russia. 4 pts. I. Reyfman
The course examines the emergence of women autobiographical prose in the late eighteenth century and the rapid growth of women’s interest autobiographical genres in the course of the nineteenth century.  Often illiterate or semi-literate in the early modern period, women became expert writers by the second third of the nineteenth century.  The reading list includes memoirs and diaries of some of the most remarkable autobiography writers of the period, including Nadezhda Durova, who lived most of her life as a man and took part in the War of 1812; Avdotia Panaeva, Nikolai Nekrasov’s common-law wife and active participant in journalistic life of the period; Sofia Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy’s wife and herself an outstanding writer.

GR6142. Russian Orthodox Culture. 4 pts. V. Izmirlieva
From Prince Valdimir’s Rus’ to the Post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin, religion has remained a key factor in the making and remaking of Russian polity and culture. This course will explore how Orthodox Christianity—whether privileged or persecuted—came to dominate the Russian religious scene and shape Russian institutions, discourses, and lived experiences. Students will draw from a variety of primary and secondary sources—chronicles, saints’ lives, travel narratives, memoirs, letters, legal documents, icons and other ritual objects, films and fictional texts, as well as a large body of scholarly works and contemporary media materials—to examine how Russia’s Orthodox past and its rewriting into competing “histories” have been used over time as “legacies” shaping the present and the future.

GR6160. Neglected Masterpieces. 4 pts. I. Reyfman
A study in the original of works that rarely receive attention in traditional courses of Russian literature. The list of readings includes works by Krylov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Kozma Prutkov, Leskov, and others.

GR6163. Anton Chekhov: Short Stories/Long Plays. 4 pts. Staff.
A detailed consideration, in the original, of Chekhov’s corpus of innovative short stories and dramas, with particular attention to how they work, how they work together, what they work with, and how best to work with them.  Readings include both primary and secondary sources; students will also have the opportunity to attend or view productions of some of the theatrical works.  Strong reading proficiency in Russian required. 

GR6164. Russian Drama and Theater: Performative Genres in Historical Contexts. 4 pts. I. Reyfman, M. Lipovetsky
In this course, our goal is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the rich tradition of Russian dramaturgy. We will embark on a journey that starts with the court drama and ends with contemporary political plays. In addition to exploring literary works, we will explore theories related to theatricality and performativity. Our primary emphasis will be on tracing the evolution of dramatic genres, we will illuminate the developmental stages of key aesthetic systems in Russian cultue, ranging from the Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, the avant-garde, and modernism up to postmodernism and docudrama.

GR6202. Pushkin. 3 pts. Staff.
The thematic and structural development of the major verse forms—narrative, dramatic, and lyric.

GR6204. Reading Turgenev. 4 pts. Staff.
A close study, in the original, of a number of Turgenev's works, major and "minor," with an eye to the methodological problems inherent in characterizing an author's oeuvre. We will consider the ways he has been read and situated in the tradition in an effort to identify--or generate--productive modes of reading Turgenev.

GR6213. Mandelshtam: The Poet and His Language. 3 pts. Staff.
Examination of various aspects of Mandelshtam’s oeuvre, with special attention to his development, from his early relations to post-symbolism to his gradual incorporation of the ideas and discourses of the post-revolutionary epoch.

GR6216. Dostoevsky. 4 pts. L. Knapp
A knowledge of Russian is not required. The major works, their structure, implications, and background.

GR6217. Pasternak. 4 pts. Staff.
A comprehensive examination of various genres of Pasternak’s writings and their relations to the poet’s aesthetics, philosophical, and religious views.

GR6226.  Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Others.  4 pts. L. Knapp.
A close examination of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, supplemented by a reading of related texts: works by Dostoevsky and others, notebooks for the novel; essays, theoretical and critical works, and works that illuminate the (folk-)religious, aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, and political dimensions of the novel.

GR6330. Russian Romanticism and its European Contexts. 4 pts. Staff.
Although the life span of Romanticism as a dominant intellectual and aesthetic force was relatively short, the impact it has left on the subsequent cultural history, up to our time, proved strong and manifold. Taking the romantic element into account can be crucial for out understanding of later cultural trends, including those that posited themselves as "anti-romantic," such as the realist novel or critique of linguistic rationalism late in the twentieth century. The principal achievement of the Romantic epoch that had lasting consequences could be seen as twofold: first, it consisted in a heightened awareness of a precarious and tense relationship between the subjective world of the self and material and social reality as its environment; and second, it conceived and prompted the emergence of a comprehensive cultural space in which ideas, imagery, and rhetorical devices migrated freely between various national traditions and various facets of intellectual, social, and aesthetic activity.

GR6401. Russian Futurism and Its Influence. 4 pts. Staff.
Exploration of the poetics and philosophy of language of the Russian Futurists in comparison with Italian Futurism and other trends in the Russian and Western avant-garde. Examination of the impact of the Russian avant-garde rebellion on literature and aesthetic ideas of the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet period. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of Russian.

GR6501. Acmeism. 4 pts. V. Izmirlieva
A survey of Acmeist aesthetics and a study in the original of major works of the Russian Acmeists: Innokentii Annenskii, Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Vladislav Khodasevich.

GR8001. Proseminar In Literary Studies. 4 pts. Staff.
Required of all candidates for the M.A. degree in Russian, Czech, Ukraine, and Polish literature. Introduction to the theory and practice of literary criticism.

GR8036-GR8037. Directed Research in Old Russian Literature and Folklore. 3 pts. Staff

GR8038-GR8039. Directed Research in Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century. 3 pts. Staff

GR8040-GR8041. Directed Research in Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century. 3 pts. Staff

GR8042-GR8043. Directed Research in the Modern Period. 3 pts. Staff

GR8044-GR8045. Directed Research in Russian Literature of the Eighteenth Century. 3 pts. Staff

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian [BCRS]

GU4002. (Dis)integration in Frames: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Issues in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav Cinemas. 3 pts A. Boskovic
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.

GR8001-GR8002. Directed Research in South Slavic, I and II. 3-4 pts. A. Boskovic.

Slavic Cultures [SLCL]

GU4120. Exploring East European Identities through Literature and Film. 3 pts. Staff
An advanced introduction to East European literature and culture through a discussion of the articulations of East European identity-shaping experiences in several major twentieth-century films and literary texts. Readings include Joseph Roth, Stanislaw Wyspiański, Bruno Schulz, and Danilo Kiš. Readings in English.

GR8020-GR8021. Directed Research in Slavic Cultures. 3 pts. Staff 

Slavic Literatures [SLLT]

GU4001. Contemporary East European Literature 4 pts. Staff
Knowledge of language is not required. A seminar focusing on the changes in the literary situation in East European countries that have accompanied and followed the end of the Communist rule. The reading list includes works by representative authors from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.
 

Ukrainian [UKRN]

GU4037. The Aura of Soviet Ukrainian Modernism. 3 pts. M. Andryczyk.
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 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 its lasting impact on today's Ukraine. This period produced several world-renowned cultural figures, whose connections with 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. Enitirely in English with a parallel reading list for those who read Ukrainian.

GU4054. Creating Identity in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture. 3 pts. M. Andryczyk.
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 the 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.

GR8001-GR8002. Directed Research in Ukrainian Literature, I and II. 3-4 pts. Staff