1 - 10 of 16 results for: SLAVIC

This seminar investigates the work and life of Nikolai Gogol, the most eccentric of Russian authors, the founder of what was dubbed Fantastic (or Magic) Realism. Our investigation will be based on close reading of the works written in various genres and created in various stages of Gogol's literary career. This study provides a perspective on the relationship between Romanticism and Realism in Russian literature (the so-called "Natural School" of the 1830-1840s), and between the popular Ukrainian culture and "high" Russian and West European traditions in Gogol's oeuvre. The seminar traces Gogol's influences on subsequent Russian literature (Dostoevsky in particular) and investigates the impact of his work on XX century modernist literature, theatre, music, and painting (Vladimir Nabokov, literature of the absurd, Dmitry Shostakovich, Marc Chagall). The seminar is intended for students interested in literature and literary studies.

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.

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.

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, with particular focus on the question of value: what, if anything, does engagement with literary works do for our lives? Issues include aesthetic self-fashioning, the paradox of tragedy, the paradox of caring, the truth-value of fiction, metaphor, authorship, irony, make-believe, expression, edification, clarification, and training. Readings are drawn from literature and film, philosophical theories of art, and stylistically interesting works of philosophy. Authors may include Sophocles, Chaucer, Dickinson, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Beckett, Kundera, Charlie Kaufman; Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas; Plato, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Taught in English.

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.

Developments in and 20th-century Russian poetry including symbolism, acmeism, futurism, and literature of the absurd. Emphasis is on close readings of individual poems. Taught in Russian.

Open to Russian majors or students working on special projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

In-depth engagement with a range of Dostoevsky's genres: early works (epistolary novella Poor Folk and experimental Double), major novels ( Crime and Punishment, The Idiot), less-read shorter works ("A Faint Heart," "Bobok," and "The Meek One"), and genre-bending House of the Dead and Diary of a Writer. Course applies recent theory of autobiography, performance, repetition and narrative gaps, to Dostoevsky's transformations of genre, philosophical and dramatic discourse, and narrative performance. Slavic students read primary texts in Russian, other participants in translation. Course conducted in English. For graduate students; undergraduates with advanced linguistic and critical competence may enroll with consent of instructor.