In Quest of Tolstoy (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)
Contents:
The formal aspects of Russian versification are examined in their historical evolution from the 18th century to the present, in both "classical" and "experimental" poetic modes. Taught in Russian, readings in Russian and English. An examination of the literary culture of the ss focusing on the publication of works by such authors as Goncharov, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky and the critical debates they engendered in the thick journals of the day.
Includes consideration of such questions as the changing role of literary criticism, the publication culture of the thick journals, the forging of authorial identity and the implications of serialization. Also includes discussion of methodological approaches to the study of nineteenth century print culture. Readings in Russian but can be read in English with permission of the instructor.
Top Authors
Topics of discussion will include: What is distinctive about Russian realism? The course will examine nineteenth century Russian realist fiction in relation to various theoretical approaches from Erich Auerbach to Roman Jakobson, and will read contemporary works of criticism or thought from Russia and Europe that may have influenced it. Readings will be in English, although students who know Russian or other relevant languages may do their reading in these.
Russian poetry, prose, and literary criticism from the late s until Tolstoi, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Khodasevich. Among the topics offered are: Films, records, and slides are used to illustrate elements in his writing. The choice of theme or approach is also open to class suggestion.
A familiarity with some of the Russian poetic movements of the early 20th century and with other Soviet prose writings of the s would be useful. Brief attention may also be given to his non-fictional works, including his letters, to his relationships with other Russian writers and writing, and to Chekhov criticism in Russia and elsewhere. Special attention is paid to the nature and evolution of Nabokov's aesthetics; the place of his Russian- and English-language novels in the European literary tradition; Nabokov's creative uses of exile to artistic, philosophical and ideological ends; and the implications of the writer's switch from Russian to English as his primary language of artistic expression.
No prior knowledge of Russian literature and culture is required. Every work of literature originates in a specific time with historically specific readers and goals in mind. Works that retain their importance beyond the period in which they were written may look different to later readers, but precisely for this reason, as much as it is possible it is useful to revisit the original situation of such a work.
This course will study the origins of important works of Russian literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whether we still read them for pleasure or not. We will look at issues of genre, readership, politics, ideology, historical figures and events. In addition to Slavists, the course will be of interest to historians and social scientists. Readings will be in Russian. Fantastic and grotesque works by the most hilarious, obsessive, and delusional character in Russian literature, who teased, fascinated, and polarized readers. Painting, literature, and film from s. New revolutionary paths for the advancement of man and society through art.
Symbolism, neoprimitivism, futurism, suprematism, and constructivism. The course, conducted as a seminar with occasional lectures, surveys twelve major Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All readings are in Russian. What has happened to the relationship between performance and religion? Has the Enlightenment project successfully secularized Western civilization and our thinking about a human subject in light of its most important horizon — the finitude of existence?
Undergraduate Courses
Critical study of major literary and cultural paradigms, starting with the revaluations of the often misunderstood Sarmatian culture and the memory of it in the 19th century, moving on to the Romantic paradigm and its dis continuations, and ending with the strongest counter-proposals for Polish mentality, identity, and self-identifications such as the Enlightenment, Positivism, and the Inter-war struggles for modernization. Discussions about terminological wars and conflicting understandings of the culture of modernism are aided by important literary works of Polish modernism, literary theory, philosophy, and concepts developed by sociology and political science.
Each time the course is offered, it focuses on a selected few concepts, such as tolerance and freedom, Polish republicanism and liberalism, the idea of a nation, Polish religious thought, the role of intelligentsia and intellectual institutions, backwardness and modernization and culture wars of recent years. Our readings span from the 15 th to the 21 st centuries and pair political thinkers and historians with writers and political and cultural theoreticians across the centuries in order to make their ideas engage with and illuminate each other.
Such readings are placed within the theoretical discussions regarding intellectual history e. Dominick LaCapra , and relations between such history and culture. An examination of the modernist movement in Ukrainian literature.
Among the issues examined in the course are questions of genre, gender, nationality, decadence, morality, social issues, and the relation of Ukrainian modernism to other modernist movements in European literatures. Readings of poetry, prose and criticism from to the present. Special attention to fiction since An in-depth analysis of Ukrainian poetry through the reading of foremost poets.
The poets selected for study can change but only the foremost poets in any period will be selected and the aim of the course will be constant: An examination of works of fiction, whether novels, short stories, or any other prose genre, that deliberately challenge established conventions, introduce new concepts or techniques, and subvert dogmas of various kinds. The goal is to explore the dynamics of literary history while surveying those works that modify or deviate from its course.
An examination of some of the major issues in literary theory and criticism that have influenced or characterized the development of Ukrainian literature. The goal of this course is to study the forces, trends, and ideas particularly the literary criticism of various periods that have shaped literature in Ukraine. The course will begin with a survey of the major histories of Ukrainian literature and the historiographical and ideological problems each of them exhibits. The balance of the course will focus on selected topics from Ukrainian literary history.
Among them might be any of the following problems or confrontations: Among the prominent critics to be considered are: An introduction to the problems of written translation of literary works from Ukrainian into English and to a lesser extent, English to Ukrainian: A detailed examination of Taras Shevchenko as a poet, as a painter, as a person, and as a prophet of the Ukrainian nation. The course covers all of Shevchenko's written works: It also examines some of his artwork.
The significance of Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature, history and society is analyzed by examining his reception from the first reviews of his works to the present time. A general survey of Ukrainian literature written outside Ukraine. The writing examined in the course includes 3 categories: Literary works by writers who live d outside Ukraine. Literary works focused on exile or diaspora topics and written by writers who spent at least part of their lives outside Ukraine. Literary works in languages other than Ukrainian primarily English on the subject of Ukrainians in the diaspora.
Special emphasis on interpretation through analysis of declaimed and sung performance estradna poezija. Readings in Croatian with English translations provided. Modern Serbian poetry from the late s to the present. Analysis of new directions in transcendental, ecumenical and ecclesiastical verse. Readings in Serbian with English translations provided. Model plays ranging from the Renaissance in Dalmatia, home of the first communal theatre in modern Europe, to the twenty-first century studied in reference to the contemporary national, ethnic and ideological background of South East and Central Europe.
Focus on theatre aesthetics and performance strategies in light of official and unofficial censorship in former Yugoslavia and its successor nations. Themes of utopianism, terrorism and repression. Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian plays and secondary literature in English translation with original language texts provided.
Assessment will be based on regular weekly exercises and on class tests to be held at the end of each term. During the tumultuous decades of the century, social, political, national issues preoccupied even aesthetics-conscious experimenters and ivory-tower dwellers. Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian plays and secondary literature in English translation with original language texts provided. All readings are available in English. They fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, and died at home and abroad.
Lectures illustrated through the use of films of productions and scenes from theatrical performances, with visiting guest directors. Historical, ethnological and stylistic study of lore—beliefs, traditions, customs—and symbolic design of the South Slavs with focus on their role in the development of tribal and national cultures. Genres covered include folk curses, toasts, riddles, proverbs, incantations, exorcisms, fables, fairy tales, legends, myths, anecdotes, stories, lamentations, lullabies, lyric verses, ballads, and heroic songs.
Special attention to the Homeric Question through application of oral epic theory to texts from the Balkan Christian, Slavic Moslem and pagan-Greek traditions. Readings in English with parallel Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian texts provided. This class will explore the context in which these experiments in literature, cinema, theatre, and contemporary art took place and the effects they still have.
Original works will be compared with a number of dramatizations and film adaptations. Original and translated Czech literary works, liturgical texts, travelogues, and other documents illustrate a number of stages in Czech literary history that encompasses thousand years. Students will be introduced to different styles, genres, and devices of various epochs. Offered every three years. Theatre has long played a key role in Czech culture and politics. Modern Czech theatre, however, has also served as a 'laboratory' of dramatic and staging experiments, conceptualized by a number of theorists.
In fact, as Keir Elam shows the scholars of the so-called Prague School initiated modern semiotics of theatre and drama. Radok as well as the theories of the Prague School.
Readings in Czech and English. The genre of short story is represented in the work of a number of Czech writers. Unlike similar movements elsewhere, especially in the Soviet Union and Germany, where the political events disrupted the artistic experiments, in Czechoslovakia they continued until the end of the first Czechoslovak Republic Inspired by several new studies of avant-garde art Benson, Levinger, Garfinkel this class, will question the generally accepted politically defined understanding of the avant-garde as works of leftist creators.
SLA H - V. His multifaceted oeuvre includes essays, plays and speeches. This class will explore the complexity of his oeuvre and his development as a writer, public figure, and eventually also politician in the context of recent political, literary and cultural history. Readings in English, for specialists in Czech.
Laughter and forgetting are the recurrent themes in both Kundera's fictional and essayistic work. When examining the variations of this topic this class will discuss Kundera's prosaic, dramatic, and essayistic texts of his Czech period and attempt to place Kundera within the European context of the 'art of fiction'. Knowledge of Czech desirable but not necessary. All readings are available in English. In Czech for majors. Current semiotic theories of drama, theatre, and cinema have been informed by the theoretical concepts developed since the s first by Russian Formalists and later by the Prague Structuralists of the so-called Prague school who often conceptualized concurrent artistic experiments and developed a language used by both practitioners and theorists Keir Elam, This aspect will serve as a point of departure for comparison of the Prague School semiotics with the modes in which contemporary theorists like Keir Elam, Patrice Pavis, and David Bordwell analyze, and theorize modern artistic trends in drama, theatre, and cinema.
What undergraduate courses are offered, and where are they located? What graduate courses are offered, and where are they located? I am not a student, how can I take a course? How can I audit a course? How can I contact an instructor? What are the faculty members' office hours?
A Study in Cultural Identity Authors: Abstract Isaak Babel — is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel was—an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture and all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem. Keywords Cultural identity literature. Before They Were Titans Authors: Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh Book Series: Abstract Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature.
As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century Russian literature, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author—for Dostoevsky, the s; for Tolstoy, the s.
Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans. Abstract Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, Belomor: While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism—an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration—the volume also recognizes the various loopholes offered by artistic expression.
Even more significant, and sinister, is that the project won the backing of famous creative luminaries who enthusiastically professed the doctrine of self-fashioning. Belomor complicates our understanding of the Gulag by looking at both prisoner motivation and official response from multiple angles, thereby offering a more expansive vision of the labor camp. Keywords History History. By Fables Alone Authors: Zorin, Andrei Book Series: Keywords History Literary Criticism.
Chapaev and His Comrades Authors: Brintlinger, Angela Book Series: Abstract "Across the twentieth century war was the central experience of the Russian people, spurring tales of the struggles and advances of the combat hero to become a prevailing Russian literary trope. These authors represented official Soviet literature and underground or dissident literature.
Serie: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History
They fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, and died at home and abroad. Most importantly, each of these writers was touched by war and reacted to the state of war in their literary works. Charms of the Cynical Reason: Abstract The impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture, as well as in the post-Soviet era.
- Boarding Pass;
- The Twins Revisited;
- Bestselling Series!
- Serie: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History » Bokkilden.
Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical, contradictory, and inadequate world, not as a necessity, but as a field for creativity, play, and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-Soviet cynical reason: Keywords Soviet culture literature.
Jackson, Robert Louis Book Series: Essays on Russian Literature combines discussions of ethical, esthetic, and philosophical interest raised by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, with close analyses of their texts. This book focuses on four thematic configurations: