Global Arc

The purpose of this course is to help students prepare for their junior independent work, senior theses, and departmental exams. The first part of the course will be devoted to close readings of short poems and literary prose texts. In the second part, the emphasis will shift to academic and journalistic prose. A major goal of the course will be learning to write coherent Russian academic prose. To support these reading and writing skills, we will also introduce participants to research methods: library research, evaluation of sources, value (and potential pitfalls) of the Russian internet.

In this course we will analyze the culture of resistance in the post-World War II Eastern Europe. We will look through the lens of literature at the main political issues that afflicted Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the second part of the 20th century. We will study texts (essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, plays, and poems) which offered various ways to resist moral and political oppression. The authors will include George Orwell, Franz Kafka (as a precursor), Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, Tadeusz Borowski, Bertolt Brecht, Heda Kovaly, and others. All readings will be in English.

Selected Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian movies will serve in this interdisciplinary seminar as a basis for discussion of Jewish pre-World War II life, the extermination of Jews during the war and the difficulties of post-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe. We will address the history of Jewish life in the region, film as social medium, the difficulties of representation, the relationship between various kinds of arts (film adaptation of literature, art in film, film about art), and moral issues linked to the depiction of war and persecution.

The course introduces students to stories that every Russian is exposed to as a child. Seemingly simple, these narratives bear deep cultural significance. We will sample a dozen of Russian fairy tales belonging to the oral tradition. We will also read and discuss two fairy tales by Alexander Pushkin, as well as short excerpts from the works by the foremost Russian scholar of folklore Vladimir Propp. Readings and discussion will be in Russian. This course is envisioned as both a language and literature course.

What is it that endows Chekhov's art with its ability to transcend divides, ensursing its lasting pertinence? Could it be that the secret lies in his unprecedented insight into the theatricality of the human predicament and the role of laughter in it? This course will undertake a comprehensive overview of his mastery of the short story in its development to arrive at a better appreciation of his theater. Unconventional literature cannot be taught conventionally, hence this collaboration between a literary scholar and a theater director.

This seminar, situated between literary, political, cultural, and art studies, will address Putin's authoritarian Russia and the symbolic patterns that govern its erratic and seemingly irrational policies. We will draw on political theory and investigative journalism as well as contemporary Russian film, fiction, and art in order to explore the peculiar, yet not unprecedented cult of violence that underlies Putin's authoritarian regime. We will examine the origins of this cult in Russian imperial and Soviet culture and its implications for our understanding of current events.

The course will trace the development of Russian science-fiction, moving chronologically from the early twentieth century through the Soviet period to the present. It will also serve as an introduction to Russian politics (since many of the works are profoundly political) and to Russia's great literary tradition (since science fiction was practiced not only by science fiction specialists, but by the foremost writers).

The course will discuss the main trends in East European history and culture, concentrating mostly on 20th and 21st centuries. Each week will be devoted to one aspect of East European studies and the classes will combine theme-plus-methodology approach. There will be several invited speakers. The course is part of the track in East European Cultures and Societies (EECS), one of the two tracks for Certificate in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

This seminar takes into account space in its manifold definitions: from the city as text, with a rhythm and a syntax of its own, to alternative, non-conventional geometries, and their aesthetics; from space/time to the outer space and its claiming; from desired or imagined spaces to the contours of the text; from architecture and the environment to global positioning systems and the digital humanities. By looking at literary and theoretical texts produced in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will track the poetics of space and the epistemological consequences of its literary expression.

This course will examine themes that are paramount in our lives as individuals, communities, and societies¿illness and healing, caregiving, epidemics, the distinction between normal and pathological. Our reflections on ethics will feature stories and storytelling as an entry point. Why do doctors and patients need stories? How does storytelling illuminate medicine as a system of representation? What rhetorical devices are embedded in the way we conceive of sickness, well-being, and the medical institutions? We will address these questions and will explore the overlaps between medicine and storytelling within texts from all over the world.