Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.
Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.
Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.
Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.
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.
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
Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar. Readings in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, depending upon the interests of individual students.
Prerequisites: POLI UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar; readings in contemporary nonfiction or fiction, depending on the interests of individual students.
Prerequisites: RUSS UN2101 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Tricksters constitute one of the universal themes or tropes in mythology and folklore of many cultures. Through the discussions of ancient Greek, North-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 buffoon, fool, jester, holy fool, kynik, picaro, adventurer, imposter, con artist, female and transgender 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”. The course will culminate in the trial of the most popular and important trickster in Soviet culture, Ostap Bender from Ilf and Petrov’s satirical novels. In the course’s finale will discuss the role of tricksters in contemporary politics.
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.
While Russians have been doomed to gloom in the Western imagination, this course challenges that idea with a brief history of the comic in Russia and the USSR. Our cultural history of the comic will challenge you to analyze the social dimension of comedy and think about its effect and purpose in a society, especially in one undergoing social and political upheaval. We will consider the structures of power that inform the effect of the comic—what, or whom, are we laughing at?—and the complex interrelationships between its producers and its audiences: the Russian literary elite, the reading public and movie-going audiences, the regime (whether imperial or Soviet, both rather fond of censorship), and those on the fringes of society, political outcasts and dissidents. Our course will focus on the cultural specificity of comedic works by non-Russians in the Russian or Soviet spheres, such as Ukrainian and Jewish writers, and their celebration of difference or, conversely, their attempts at assimilation via their comedy. Our primary texts will be paired with short theoretical and analytical texts on laughter and the comic.
Counts as an elective ("additional course") for the relevant majors and concentrations in Slavic/Russian.
There are no prerequisites for this course. No knowledge of Russian is required.
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.
Prerequisites: Departmental approval.
Prerequisites: the department's permission. Supervised Individual Research
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
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.
Many modern theories of grammar are almost entirely based on English, having been developed mainly to describe the structure of English and, to a much lesser extent, other familiar languages of Europe. But the languages of the world are highly diverse, many of them, in contrast to English, with highly complex word and inflectional structures and relatively simple phrasal structures. Theories of grammar built on English serve such languages poorly. This course seeks to address this imbalance by focusing on languages with complex morphological and morphosyntactic structures. Because the grammars of such languages are built around word structures, we will be exploring current lexicalist theories of grammar such as Lexical Functional Grammar and Construction Grammar to develop formal explicit analyses of these languages. One learns morphological and morphosyntactic analysis by doing it across languages of various types, so we will regularly be working through problems to analyze in class.
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.
This seminar brings anthropological perspectives to bear on the practices and ideologies of cultural heritage in the Republic of Georgia today, whee culture has proven a key political and economic pawn in a context of ongoing postsocialist struggle.......
The course is dedicated to “Chevengur”, Andrey Platonov's famous and complicated novel about the Russian Revolution. The novel will be interpreted as a compendium and a peculiar philosophical exploration of various forms of utopian thinking and will be used as a perspective to the history of the utopian genre.
After introductory reading of parts of the novel, the first part of the course will juxtapose Platonov’s work to famous literary and philosophical versions of utopian thinking (like Thomas More’s “Utopia”; Fourier’s “Ideal community”; texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin that exemplify the fate of utopia in the communist philosophy and politics, as well as the transformation of the genre into "science-based" project for transformation of society). A following lecture will provide the students with a general overview of the contradictory history of the utopian genre and its branches in the elitist and popular culture. Discussing briefly the birth of anti-utopias and dystopias, the course will pay special attention to the utopian projects of the Russian avant-garde, created during the Revolution and in the times of war communism.
Having this historical context in mind, the second part of the course will focus on close reading of the novel and will handle various problems, such as:
1. The structure of plot, narrative perspective, voice of the narrator, unusual deviations in Platonov’s style and language, structure of metaphors and tropes, etc.
2. The place and meaning of various strange peasant and “stupid” utopias, which are part of the novel’s imaginary world. Here the class will discuss Platonov's attempt to create an absurd meta-utopia (utopia exploring other utopias), which is exemplified in the town of Chevengur – the fictional ‘axis mundi” of sentimental fools.
3. The novel’s inter-textual references to other important works of the classical Russian literature and to the religious and philosophical/political projects of Russian Cosmism and Biocosmism. Here the focus of discussion will move toward Platonov’s own metaphysical and “biocosmic” ideas (or illusions) in their dramatic relations to the complex literary work.
In its third part, the course will return to the present-day and will focus on the critical reception of “Chevengur” in recent decades, paying special attention to some contemporary
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.
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 In light of the predicted loss of up to 90% of the world languages by the end of this century, it has become urgent that linguists take a more active role in documenting and conserving endangered languages. In this course, we will learn the essential skills and technology of language documentation through work with speakers of an endangered language.
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.
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. The films are paired with the writings of the practitioners as well as the works of such theorists as André Bazin, Jacques Rancière, and Laura Mulvey. All readings are in English and the films will be screened with English subtitles. No knowledge of Russian is required or expected.
Prerequisites: 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, and mimesis.
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.
Prerequisites: 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).
In the last two decades, methods of post-colonial studies have entered the field of study of post-communist cultures and literatures. More and more frequently concepts such as "internal colonialism", "crypto-colonialism", "self-colonization", “Baltic colonialism” "decolonization", etc. are used. Is this “post-colonial turn” a productive approach, which is opening up new heuristic perspectives to the study of post-communist condition? Or is it, on the contrary, another empty fad? The present course returns to the classic sources of the post-colonial and post-socialist studies and attempts to conduct a methodologically controlled comparison that is looking for similarities while carefully observing and respecting differences.
The methodological seminar will begin with an introduction aimed at clarifying the concepts and historical forms of colonialism. Ancient and medieval forms of colonization will be explored as distinct from modern colonialism, associated with a new type of navigation and shipping, with conquering the oceans and gradually creating modern colonial empires of global scope. Issues associated with the correlation between capitalism, colonialism and the types of nationalism in the 19th century, varieties of colonial conquest, governance and with colonial imagination will be discussed here (with special attention being paid to the concept of "self-colonization" in view of the global dominance of Eurocentrism in social imagination).
The second part of the course will involve reading and analysis of the great leaders of the anti-colonial movement such as M. Gandhi, Fr. Fanon and A. Césaire in comparison with some Russian and East European dissident thinkers from the late Cold War era (Al. Solzhenitsyn, V.Havel, Milan Kundera etc). Important theorists of the post-colonial turn such as. Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak etc. will be read, too.
In its third part, the course will move to the present day and address its major topic. It will compare rival analytical approaches to state communism and the transition period, introducing the similarities and variances between the decolonization processes during the second half of the twentieth century and the later collapse of Soviet totalitarianism. Competing methodological approaches and concepts (such as “”Balkanism”, “nesting orientalism”, |self-colonization”, “internal colonialism”, “Baltic Post-colonialism” &
The culture of Kyivan Rus’ (10th-13th 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.
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.