1 - 10 of 35 results for: SLAVIC ; Currently searching offered courses. You can also include unoffered courses

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.

Literally meaning "borderland," Ukraine has embodied in-betweeness in all possible ways. In the course, we will consider the historical permeability of its territorial, linguistic, and ethnic borders as an opportunity to explore the multiple dimensions of Ukraine's relations its neighbors. The reading materials for the course include the earliest records of Herodotus about the prehistoric Ukrainian civilizations, the cultural legacy of Kyivan Rus¿ and baroque, as well as artistic works created during romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism. In addition to learning how to interpret literary texts, we will examine the works of visual and performative arts which shape modern Ukraine and create several cartographic projects with the use of GIS tools. All required texts are in English. No knowledge of Ukrainian is required.

What happens when you collect and use other people's words? This class considers folklore and literature based on it, focusing on the theme of objects that come to life and threaten their makers or owners (including Russian fairy tales and Nikolai Gogol's stories, the Golem legend and Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and Ovid's and Shaw's Pygmalion). We read essays by Jacob Grimm, Sigmund Freud, Roman Jakobson, and others, to understand what folklore can mean and how the oral and the written can interact. Students collect living folklore from a group of their choosing. This course fulfills the second-level Writing and Rhetoric Requirement (Write-2) and emphasizes oral and multimedia presentation.

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.

Connections of philosophy and science to literary form in War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, Chekhov stories: alternative shapes of time, perception, significant action. Taught in English. NOTE: This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units and a letter grade to be eligible for Ways credit.

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. (This course must be taken for a letter grade and a minimum of 3 units to satisfy a Ways requirement.)

Historically shaped by shifting borders and mixing of various cultures and languages, identities in-between have been in abundance in Central-Eastern Europe. This course offers a comprehensive study of the oeuvre of several major Central-European authors of modernity: the Ukrainian-Russian Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), the Czech-German-Jewish Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the Austrian-Galician-Jewish Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), the Ukrainian-Galician Olha Kobylyans¿ka (1863-1942), the Russian-German Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), the Jewish-Polish-Galician Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), and the Polish-Argentinean Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969). Performing their selves in two or more cultures, these writers were engaged in identity games and produced hybrid texts with which they intervened into the major culture as others. In the course, we will apply post-structuralist and post-colonial concepts such as minor language, heterotopia, in-betweenness, mimicry, indeterminacy, exile, displacement, and transnationalism to the study of the writers oeuvres. We will also master the sociolinguistic analysis of such multi-lingual phenomena as self-translation, code-switching, and calquing and examine various versions of the same text to uncover the palimpsest of hybrid identities.

How does memory work in Soviet and post-Soviet space? How do cities create and transform memory? This course uncovers the layers of cultural history in four Russian and Ukrainian cities: Kyiv, Odesa, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. All four cities were imagined as utopian projects and all underwent transformation and destruction in the 20th century; their earlier layers exist only in literary texts and films. Readings combine literary and critical theory (Benjamin,Foucault, Barthes, Lotman) with fiction and films (Akhmatova, Andrukhovych, Babel, Bitov, Bulgakov, Bunin, Paradzhanov, Sokurov, Trifonov, Zhabotinsky, Vertov, Zeldovich) that display the ongoing collective memory work on the Soviet legacy. Students will create cartographic projects with Google Maps, Earth and Tour Builder, and HyperCities that visualize the urban palimpsest of cities undergoing major transformations.