41 - 50 of 57 results for: SLAVIC

The development of 19th-century Russian novel through close reading and broad cultural examination of three masterpieces: Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859), Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), and Leo Tolstoy¿s Anna Karenina (1877) - the novels which have been part of the European literary canon long before Oprah Winfrey put them in her reading list. Through the analysis of the novels and their adaptations, students will study the aesthetic contours of Russian Realism and its intermedial capacities. Special attention will be paid to the questions of genre, discource, medium and itermediality, relationship between artist, audience, and critic.

The Age of Revolution: Readings in Russian Modernist Prose of the 1920-30s: What makes Russian modernist prose special? Or is there anything special about Russian modernist prose? This course aims to answer these questions through close readings of works by Babel, Mandelstam, Zoshchenko, Platonov, Olesha and Bulgakov. Aesthetic issues such as hero, plot, and narrative devices will be addressed with the aid of contemporaneous literary theory (Shklovsky, Tynianov, Eikhenbaum, Bakhtin). Novels and theory will be read in English.

The course offers a survey of Soviet and post-Soviet literary texts and films created by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian artists and marginalized or repressed by the Soviet regime. The first part of the course will focus on the topics of opposition and dissent, generational conflict, modernization, Soviet everyday life, gender, citizenship and national identity, state-published and samizdat literature, "village" and "cosmopolitan" culture, etc. The second part of it will be devoted to the postmodernist aesthetics and ideology in the dismantlement of totalitarian society, as well in the process of shaping post-Soviet identities. The reading materials range from the fictional, poetic, and publicistic works written by Noble-prize (Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Alexievich) and other major writers of the period to the drama, film, and popular culture.

Nabokov'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.

Why do educated elites care about popular or folk culture, and how do they use it? An intellectual history of two centuries of folklore theory, with examples drawn from Eastern European (Slavic and Jewish) lore; students collect other folklore themselves and analyze it. Separate section for Russian readers.

Pushkin's poems, prose, and drafts in dialogue with contemporaries and cultural milieu. Emphasis on innovation and controversy in genre, lyrical form and personal idiom, shaping a public discourse. Taught in English.

Osip Mandelstam from Symbolism to Acmeism, to Post-Modernism: poetry, thought, culture, politics, reception. Russian Symbolism (Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ivanov, Bely, Blok, Annensky, Kuzmin); Acmeism/Futurism; reception; Mandelstam in Soviet civilization; poet's social function; memory, biography and cultural theory; Acmeist paradigm in the late Soviet/post-Soviet poetry: Sots-Art, Kibirov, Gandlevsky, Rubinshtein, et al. Prerequisite: Advanced Russian strongly recommended.

From earliest times through the 17th century. The development of literary and historical genres, and links among literature and art, architecture, and religious culture. Readings in English; graduate students read in original.

Close analysis of lyrical poems of Russian classical poets from Mikhail Lomonosov to Vladimir Soloviev. Taught in Russian. Prerequisite: Two years of Russian