1 - 10 of 12 results for: SLAVIC

As far apart as Dickinson and Dostoevsky are in terms of national contexts, gendered possibilities of life, and their choice of minimalist or maximalist forms, their experiences of constriction and freedom bore significant similarities. Dostoevsky penned his vow to love life on the day that he was manacled as a political prisoner and marched off to thirteen years of forced labor and exile in Siberia. He exploded back on the Petersburg literary scene in the early 1860's with three block-busters, Notes from the Underground, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, and Crime and Punishment, establishing himself forever as Russia's most controversial explorer of the violence of human thought. In these same years Emily Dickinson was sequestering herself in her family's Amherst house for the remainder of her life, yet she announced her rebel's credo in these enigmatic lines: "My Life Had Stood, a Loaded Gun - until the Day..." In this class we will explore the idea that Emily Dickinson and Fyodor Dostoevsky may be seen as original shifters of modern literary art and philosophy. We will unpack the agonizing relationship of freedom, action, and language that both authors explore. Classes will be organized around presentations, debates in pairs, the exploration of "scandalous scenes," and finally a symposium in which students will present and contribute to each other's paper projects. There are no prerequisites for this course apart from a desire to read poems and novels closely and in tandem.

Preference to sophomores. An investigation of the works and life of Nikolai Gogol, the most eccentric of Russian authors and the founder of what is dubbed Fantastic Realism. Our investigation will be based on close reading of works written in various genres and created in various stages of Gogol's literary career. Taught in English.

What do Slavoj Zizek, Novak Djokovic, Marina Abramovic, Melania Trump, Emir Kusturica, and the captain of the Croatian national football team have in common? All were born in a country that no longer exists, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992). This course will introduce masterpieces of Yugoslav literature and film, examining the social and political complexities of a multicultural society that collapsed into civil war (i.e. Bosnia, Kosovo) in the 1990s. In English with material available in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian.

A survey of metric forms, rhyming principles and stanzaic patterns in the Russian poetry of the 18th - 21st centuries. Taught in Russian. Prerequisite: Two years of Russian.

This course discusses the transition from predominantly poetic to predominantly prosaic creativity in the Russian literature of the first half of the 19th century Russian literature and the birth of the great Russian novel. It covers three major Russian writers “-- Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol -- and examines the changes in the Russian literary scene affected by their work. An emphasis is placed on close reading of literary texts and analysis of literary techniques employed in them. Taught in English.

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

"Quests for my own word are in fact quests for a word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself," writes Mikhail Bakhtin towards the end of his life. It was this ceaseless pursuit of another word that allowed Bakhtin, one of the most distinguished literary critics of the twentieth century, to author several influential literary theory concepts, many of which deal with the ideas of multiplicity, diversity and unfinalizability. The seminar explores these core concepts through close reading of key texts in English and investigates their reverberations in the writings of other thinkers such as Kristeva, de Man and Derrida

The relatively slim body of work produced by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky helped redefine the possibilities of the art of cinema. Older and younger generations of directors continue to be inspired by his trademark long shot, unconventional narrative techniques, everence for landscape and nature, and by general spatio-temporal discontinuity. The course provides a systematic examination of the director's complete oeuvre (seven feature films and his works for radio and opera) along with his main theoretical treatise Sculpting in Time.

A survey of metric forms, rhyming principles and stanzaic patterns in the Russian poetry of the 18th - 21st centuries. Taught in Russian. Prerequisite: Two years of Russian.