1 - 10 of 24 results for: SLAVGEN

Preference to sophomores. The work and life of Nikolai Gogol, the eccentric founder of Fantastic Realism. The relationship between romanticism and realism in Russian literature, and between popular Ukranian culture and high Russian and W. European traditions in Gogol's oeuvre. The impact of his work on 20th-century modernist literature, music, and art, including Nabokov, literature of the absurd, Shostakovich, Meyerhold, and Chagall.

This course will be devoted to a close reading and detailed discussion of Alexander Pushkin¿s masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, in the context ofnnineteenth-century Russian and continental literary history. We will discuss major theoretical and literary-historical questions: What is realismnin literature? How does it differ from other literary epochs, movements and styles? What is the novel and how does it relate to other genres? Innwhat way does the novel in verse differ from the novel in prose? We will also explore the relationships between the narrator and the author andnbetween the narrator and the characters in the text. Through examination of the constituent elements of verse language, we will see Pushkin¿sninventive contributions to world literature.

Russian literature is identified with its great 19th c. novels,"baggy monsters" of 600-1200 pages. In this course we will instead investigate an array of short fictional forms (stories, novellas, tales, plays, and journalistic sketches) by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, in light of their competitive redefinitions of the tasks of art and consciousness, as well as their continuing technical and philosophical impact on modern narrative. No prerequisites. Course conducted in English. Students with Russian competence will have opportunity to read and work with texts in original

Russian culture and society since 1953 through literature (in English translation). Topics: opposition and dissent; generational conflict; modernization; everyday life, gender, ethnicity, class, citizenship, exit from communism. Literature of the "Thaw," state-published and samizdat, "village" and "cosmopolitan," the new emigration, Sots-Art, and the Russian "post-modern." Solzhenistyn, Shalamov, Trifonov, Siniavsky-Tertz, Erofeev, Dovlatov, Brodsky, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, Ulitskaya, Sorokin. Requirements: three reaction papers and final exam (UG); research paper for graduate credit (extra section for graduate students; may register for SLAVLIT 399)

Nabakov's techniques of migration and camouflage as he inhabits the literary and historical contexts of St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, America, and Switzerland. His early and late stories, last Russian novel The Gift, Lolita (the novel and screenplay), and Pale Fire. Readings in English. Russian speakers will be encouraged to read Russian texts in original.

Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin.

The term cinematography, which literally means "inscribing motion," tends to lose the "graphic" part in modern use. However, several influential film-makers not only practiced the art of "inscribing motion" but also wrote texts discussing the aesthetic premises of cinematographic art. This course explores theories of cinema as propagated by the following film-makers: Vertov, Eisenstein, Godard, Bresson, Antonioni, Pasolini, Tarkovsky, Greenaway, and Lynch. Selected key texts will be supplemented by screenings of classic films, indicative of each director's work.

Anna Karenina, the novel as a case study in the contest between "modernity" and "tradition," their ethical order, ideology, cultural codes, and philosophies. Images of society, women and men in Tolstoy v. those of his contemporaries: Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Weber, Durkheim, Freud. Open to juniors, seniors and graduate students. Requirements: three interpretive essays (500-1000 words each). Analysis of a passage from the novel; AK refracted through a "philosophical" prism and vice versa (30% each); class discussion and Forum (10%).

This course will employ a multitude of prison-related texts (letters, memoirs, short stories, historical accounts, films, and theoretical criticism) to explore the connection between incarceration and inspiration. Together we will examine the following questions: what is the link between creativity and the penitentiary? What is the allure of crime and the function of prison? What effect does the restriction of space have on the mind? How does life-writing versus fictional writing capture the prison experience? The quarter will culminate with a visit to an area correctional facility.