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: 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.
Of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages – representing migrations and historical
developments thousands of years old – the majority are primarily oral, little documented,
and increasingly endangered under the onslaught of global languages like English. This
course will take the unprecedented, paradoxical linguistic capital of New York City as a
lens for examining how immigrants form communities in a new land, how those
communities are integrated into the wider society, and how they grapple with linguistic and
cultural change. Drawing on sociolinguistics, anthropology, and history, the course will
focus on texts from and encounters with members of three of the city’s fastest-growing but
least-studied communities (Indigenous Americans, Himalayans, Central Asians) before
closing with a series of classes exploring broader questions around mapping, education,
policy, the role of linguists, revitalization and the future of language and mobility.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 class offers an introduction to Hebrew culture from a historical and literary perspective, focusing on the intersection of linguistic ideology, and literary and cultural creativity. What, we will ask, is the relationship between what people think about Hebrew and what they write in Hebrew?
We will investigate the manners in which Hebrew was imagined – as the language of God, the language of the Jews, the language of the patriarchy, the language of secularism, the language of Messianism, the language of nationalism, a dead language, a diasporic Eastern European language, a local Middle Eastern Language, ext., and how these conflicting imaginaries informed Hebrew creativity.
This class does not require prior knowledge of Hebrew. Students proficient in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, and/or European languages are encouraged to contact the instructor in advance for supplementary material in these languages.
This 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
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.
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.
Expressive culture in the form of traditional and mediated performing and visual arts, film and literature has reflected and shaped modern Georgian social life in immeasurable ways. This seminar brings anthropological perspectives to bear on how expressive culture has served to articulate national and local senses of identity, grappled with collective trauma, and forged avant-garde creative networks within and beyond Georgia’s borders in the socialist and postsocialist periods. The course is organized in three units: it begins by interrogating the curatorial interventions of international organizations like UNESCO and their role in commodifying Georgian culture for global markets, proceeds by exploring powerful creative responses to colonial and totalitarian experience, and concludes by focusing on the capital city of Tbilisi–its built spaces, ever-changing social configurations, and shifting value systems–as a persistent muse in expressive cultural forms.
There are no prerequisites and the course assumes no prior knowledge of Georgian history, language, or culture.
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.
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 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. Workload: readings & discussion, weekly problems, and final examination.
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.
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.
If you have a passion for music, like listening to music, or simply want to explore the realm of Russian melodies, this course is made for you. In the class, we'll focus on the development and strengthening of “four language skills”: speaking, listening, reading, and writing in Russian. You will learn to analyze and interpret lyrics, compare and contrast music across generations, discuss the values of a certain generation of people, and argue the popularity of music genres in specific time periods. Beyond linguistic proficiency, the course will immerse you in a comprehensive exploration of common knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, cultural traditions, and behavioral patterns unique to the people of Russia.
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 are a crucial lens for looking in specific detail at the long-run history of places, peoples, and cultures, telling us “What’s where why?”, as language typologists sometimes put it. 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 Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia), where a constellation of languages from a variety of families, as well as isolates, have long been in close contact. Lesser-studied languages large and small will be examined in close-up for both their linguistic features and the natural, social, and historical forces that shape them.
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.
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.
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.
How language structure and usage varies according to societal factors such as social history and socioeconomic factors, illustrated with study modules on language contact, language standardization and literacy, quantitative sociolinguistic theory, language allegiance, language, and power.
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.
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 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 and their significance within a broader cultural context. Through the lens of these dramatic genres, we will illuminate the developmental stages of key aesthetic systems in Russian culture, ranging from the Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, the avant-garde, and modernism up to postmodernism and docudrama.
The course is designed primarily for graduate students in the Slavic field who are interested in Russian drama and theater (a subfield that we are rarely addressing). It is designated GR6***, because few of these texts are available in translation, and reading the originals requires advanced knowledge of Russian. The course will fulfill requirements for M.A. and M.Phil. degrees. Advanced Russian undergraduate majors with native or near native knowledge of Russian will be allowed to take the course with the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: the departments permission.
Directed Research in Russian Literature of the 20th Century.