Previously Taught Courses

BCSN Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian POLI Polish
CZEC Czech RUSS Russian
REES Russian &  Eastern European    

POLI 20403 / 30403/30403 Third-Year Polish I

(30403)

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter--the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter--the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter--the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

All work in Polish.

2022-2023 Autumn

REES REES 24425/34425 Russia’s Culture Wars

(REES 24425)

A look at contemporary Russian culture through Russia’s invasions, from Afghanistan in 1979 to Ukraine in 2022. Broadly, this course explores the extent to which war and other types of state violence determine cultural life. How do the policies and tactics of war, and the art and literature of wartime, convey ideas about power and the state, traditional vs. modern values, civilizational mission vs. cultural pluralism? Beyond Russian literature and film, we consider voices from Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Chechnya, Syria, Belarus, and Ukraine, asking, What is the cultural impact of Russia’s invasions?

2022-2023 Autumn

RUSS 10103 First-Year Russian I

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This year-long course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103 First-Year Polish I

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g., communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

CZEC 10103 First-Year Czech I

This course introduces the Czech language to those students who would like to speak Czech or use the language for reading and research purposes. All four major communicative skills (i.e. reading, writing, listening, speaking) are stressed. Students will also learn about Czech culture through readings, films and class activities. This three- quarter sequence prepares students for the second-year Czech course and to study or travel abroad in the Czech Republic. Conversation practice is held weekly.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10103 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

This three-quarter sequence course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages introduces students to the basics of four basic skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It maintains a good balance of the three languages, their respective grammatical and lexical differences, and the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Students are encouraged to concentrate on the language and culture of their interest and choice. The course objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of the spoken and written languages, while simultaneously working on basic interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural communication. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, dialogues and texts and, reinforced by the students and instructor, screenings of short announcements, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and the like. Once a week, one-on-one 15-minute conversation sessions with the instructor offer students the opportunity to review and practice the materials presented in class. The course is supplemented with cultural events, guest speakers and selected media. Together with the conversation sessions, these supplements improve the students’ ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds— essential for establishing successful, positive relationships across cultural boundaries.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10203 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

This three-quarter sequence course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages introduces students to the basics of four basic skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It maintains a good balance of the three languages, their respective grammatical and lexical differences, and the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Students are encouraged to concentrate on the language and culture of their interest and choice. The course objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of the spoken and written languages, while simultaneously working on basic interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural communication. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, dialogues and texts and, reinforced by the students and instructor, screenings of short announcements, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and the like. Once a week, one-on-one 15-minute conversation sessions with the instructor offer students the opportunity to review and practice the materials presented in class. The course is supplemented with cultural events, guest speakers and selected media. Together with the conversation sessions, these supplements improve the students’ ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds— essential for establishing successful, positive relationships across cultural boundaries.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 10203 First-Year Czech II

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 10203 First-Year Polish II

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student’s level of preparation. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10203 First-Year Russian II

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All five major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, comprehension, and speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 10303 First-Year Czech III

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10303 First-Year Polish III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

POLI 10203 or consent of instructor.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10303 First-Year Russian III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Class meets Monday through Friday; Tuesday and Thursday meetings will be arranged with the instructor.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian III

This three-quarter sequence course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages introduces students to the basics of four basic skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It maintains a good balance of the three languages, their respective grammatical and lexical differences, and the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Students are encouraged to concentrate on the language and culture of their interest and choice. The course objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of the spoken and written languages, while simultaneously working on basic interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural communication. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, dialogues and texts and, reinforced by the students and instructor, screenings of short announcements, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and the like. Once a week, one-on-one 15-minute conversation sessions with the instructor offer students the opportunity to review and practice the materials presented in class. The course is supplemented with cultural events, guest speakers and selected media. Together with the conversation sessions, these supplements improve the students’ ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds— essential for establishing successful, positive relationships across cultural boundaries.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10400 Russian through Pushkin I

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin’s shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Not open to students who have taken RUSS 10100-10200-10300.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10500 Russian through Pushkin II

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin’s shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Not open to students who have taken RUSS 10100-10200-10300.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10600 Russian through Pushkin III

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin’s shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Not open to students who have taken RUSS 10100-10200-10300.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

The Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures course is designed for both students who have completed the first- year sequence and heritage learners. Its main objective is to develop further communicative skills—interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural—using authentic materials representing the contemporary spoken and written language in authentic cultural contexts. Students are presented with a series of texts, such as newspaper articles, interviews with writers, actors, athletes, short biographies, book and film reviews, university websites, travel blogs, etc. Audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced and developed throughout the quarter. Textual and audiovisual materials are selected to best exemplify the outlined themes while maintaining a good balance of the three languages and their respective grammatical and lexical differences in order to assess students’ progress in all four skills. Each of the 12 units is accompanied with a unit test, all of which, including the final exam at the end of the term, mirror the tasks in the practical proficiency assessment test that students can take at the end of the spring quarter. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers and cultural events. The prerequisite is BCSN 10303 or the equivalent.

BCSN 10303 or consent of instructor

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 Second-Year Russian I

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20103 Second-Year Polish I

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10300 or equivalent.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20203 Second-Year Polish II

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20203 Second-Year Russian II

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategics are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practices is held twice a week.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20203 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

The Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures course is designed for both students who have completed the first- year sequence and heritage learners. Its main objective is to develop further communicative skills—interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural—using authentic materials representing the contemporary spoken and written language in authentic cultural contexts. Students are presented with a series of texts, such as newspaper articles, interviews with writers, actors, athletes, short biographies, book and film reviews, university websites, travel blogs, etc. Audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced and developed throughout the quarter. Textual and audiovisual materials are selected to best exemplify the outlined themes while maintaining a good balance of the three languages and their respective grammatical and lexical differences in order to assess students’ progress in all four skills. Each of the 12 units is accompanied with a unit test, all of which, including the final exam at the end of the term, mirror the tasks in the practical proficiency assessment test that students can take at the end of the spring quarter. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers and cultural events. The prerequisite is BCSN 10303 or the equivalent.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian III

The Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures course is designed for both students who have completed the first- year sequence and heritage learners. Its main objective is to develop further communicative skills—interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural—using authentic materials representing the contemporary spoken and written language in authentic cultural contexts. Students are presented with a series of texts, such as newspaper articles, interviews with writers, actors, athletes, short biographies, book and film reviews, university websites, travel blogs, etc. Audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced and developed throughout the quarter. Textual and audiovisual materials are selected to best exemplify the outlined themes while maintaining a good balance of the three languages and their respective grammatical and lexical differences in order to assess students’ progress in all four skills. Each of the 12 units is accompanied with a unit test, all of which, including the final exam at the end of the term, mirror the tasks in the practical proficiency assessment test that students can take at the end of the spring quarter. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers and cultural events. The prerequisite is BCSN 10303 or the equivalent.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20303 Second-Year Russian III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Class meets Monday through Friday; Tuesday and Thursday meetings will be arranged with the instructor.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20303 Second-Year Polish III

The primary goal of second year Polish is to expand the student’s speaking, reading and writing skills by building on grammar and vocabulary learned during the first year of study. As a complement to the linguistic side of the course, the student will gain a greater familiarity with Polish history and culture through varied means including readings of literary works, articles from contemporary Polish newspapers and movies.

Fall Quarter of Second Year Polish or instructor consent.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20802 Third-Year Russian through Culture II

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20902 Third-Year Russian through Culture III

(REES 20902)

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

Russian 20701 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 21600 Russian for Heritage Learners

This course examines the major aspects of Russian grammar and stylistics essential for heritage learners. Students engage in close readings and discussions of short stories by classic and contemporary Russian authors (e.g., Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Platonov, Bulgakov, Erofeev, Tolstaya), with special emphasis on their linguistic and stylistic differences. All work in Russian.

Ability to speak Russian fluently required; formal training in Russian not required

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 26012 Introduction to Russian Civilization II

(HIST 14000 / SOSC 24100)

The second quarter continues on through the post-Soviet period. Working closely with a variety of primary sources—from oral legends to film and music, from political treatises to literary masterpieces—we will track the evolution of Russian civilization over the centuries and through radically different political regimes. Topics to be discussed include the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western culture in Russian civilization; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual and cultural life; the relationship between center and periphery; systems of social and political legitimization; and symbols and practices of collective identity.

Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20000 /30000 Tolstoy's Late Works

(FNDL 22850 / RLIT 32900 / RLST 28501)

This course examines the works written by Tolstoy after Anna Karenina, when he abandoned the novel as a form and gave up his copyright. Readings include his influential writings on non-violence and vegetarianism, his challenges to church and state authority, as well as later literary works, which some believe surpass the famous novels he had renounced. We will also explore the particularities of Tolstoy’s charisma in these years, when he came to be viewed as a second Tsar in Russia and as a moral authority throughout the world.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20020 /30020 Pale Fire

(FNDL 25311 / ENGL 22817 / GNSE 29610 / GNSE 39610)

This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 21302 /30102 Advanced Russian through Media I

(REES 21302 / REES 30102 )

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters). Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21402 /30202 Advanced Russian through Media II

(REES 21402 / REES 30202)

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format).

Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters).

Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21502 /30302 Adv Russian Through Media-III

(REES 21502 / REES 30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

REES 21000 /31000 Gombrowicz: The Writer as Philosopher

(FNDL 26903 / ISHU 29405 )

In this course, we dwell on Witold Gombrowicz the philosopher, exploring the components of his authorial style and concepts that substantiate his claim to both the literary and the philosophical spheres. Entangled in an ongoing battle with basic philosophical tenets and, indeed, with existence itself, this erudite Polish author is a prime example of a 20th century modernist whose philosophical novels explode with uncanny laughter. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who established their reputations as writers/philosophers, Gombrowicz applied distinctly literary models to the same questions that they explored. We investigate these models in depth, as we focus on Gombrowicz’s novels, philosophical lectures, and some of his autobiographical writings. With an insight from recent criticism of these primary texts, we seek answers to the more general question: What makes this author a philosopher?

All readings in English.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 21002 /31002 Kieslowski's French Cinema

(CMLT 24405 / CMST 24405 / CMST 34405 / FNDL 25312)

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, White, Red turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema. We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one's identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker's dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker's contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screen scripts, Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 21101 /31104 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Fiction

(REES 21101 / REES 31104)

This one quarter course is designed to help students over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training—the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited literary texts. The selected pieces of fiction and the exercises drawn from them engage the language’s structure on every page. Immersed in a complete language experience, students learn how to engage the natural, organic language of literary texts across a variety of styles and themes enabling them to work with ever more challenging material. The course objective is to hone students’ abilities to analyze increasingly complex unrevised texts, identify various styles and registers of the language, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations in both spoken and written format. Attention is given to improving students’ abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize and discuss abstract topics. Building vocabulary is stressed as a key to making progress, while issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course. Classes are conducted in the target language and may be taken for pass/fail. The prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language or the equivalent.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 /31203 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language Through Film

(REES 21200 / REES 31203)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. This course addresses the theme of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav identity through discussion and interpretation based on selected films, documentaries, images, and related texts—historical and literary, popular press, advertisements, screenplays, and literature e on film. Emphasis is on interpersonal communication as well as the interpretation and production of language in written and oral forms. The course engages in systematic grammar review, along with introduction of some new linguistic topics, with constant practice in writing and vocabulary enrichment. The syllabus includes the screening of six films, each from a different director, region, and period, starting with Cinema Komunisto (2012), a documentary by Mila Turajlic. This film will be crucial for understanding how Yugoslav cinema was born and how, in its origins, it belongs to what a later cinephile, Fredric Jameson, has called a “geopolitical aesthetic.” We shall investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema, and pay close attention to aesthetic conceptions and concrete formal properties, and more importantly, to language, narrative logic, and style.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 21300 /31303 (Re)Branding the Balkan City:Contemp. Belgrade/Sarajevo/Zagreb

(ARCH 21300 / ARTH 21333 / ARTH 31333 / GLST 21301 / HIST 24008 / REES 21300 / REES 31303)

The course uses an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, infrastructure and transformations of cities, mainly the capitals of today’s Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia. There is a particular need to survey this region and feed the newfound interest in it, mainly because Yugoslav architecture embodied one of the great political experiments of the modern era. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, urban life as praxis, art and design movements, film, music, food, architectural histories and styles, metropolitan citizenship, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. One of them is a tour through the 2018 show at MoMA “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980” a project curated with the goal to find a place for Yugoslav Modernism in the architectural canon. Classes are held in English. No knowledge of South Slavic languages is required.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 21400 /31403 Advanced BCS: Language through Art and Architecture

(REES 21400 / REES 31403)

This course foregrounds different periods in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav art and architecture. Situated between the capitalist West and the socialist East, Yugoslavia’s architects responded to contradictory demands and influences, developing a postwar architecture both in line with and distinct from the design approaches seen elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Drawing on the country’s own idiosyncrasies, diverse heritage and influences, the course surveys examples of architectural styles from classical to Baroque, through Art Nouveau and Modernism, all the way to full-blown Brutalism with its heft and material honesty. Given that Yugoslav architecture also expressed one of the great political experiments of the modern era, the course entertains many questions on related topics. While exploring major cities, their infrastructure, houses, buildings, monuments, churches and more, the course delves into advanced grammatical topics with the goal of increasing proficiency in both aural and reading comprehension, in addition to honing writing and speaking styles. Classes are conducted in the target language and may be taken for pass/fail. The prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language or the equivalent.

The course prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language(s) or the consent of the instructor.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

REES 23154 /33154 XCAP: The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities

(KNOW 29975)

Any class is an intentional community of sorts: people gathered together with a sense of collective purpose. But often the hopes of students are not met by the content or the methods in the classroom. Can we do better by making the process more intentional—clarifying and developing a collective sense of purpose at the outset? We will start by forming a collective plan on topics to be explored—anything from iconic American communities and Russian communes to memoir studies and economics. Possible projects include creating an intentional community in an off-campus location, designing a communal space, rewriting manifestos, or creating a new communal charter. We can cover anything from economics, space, and gender to the problem of leadership and secular belief systems. We may also want to utilize alternative modes of learning, besides reading and discussing texts, such as roleplaying. A few students in the class have some experience in intentional communities, and we will welcome their input and suggestions

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24220 /34220 Anxious Spaces

(ARCH 24220 / GNSE 24220 / GNSE 34220)

This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that “angst” is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are ‘felt’ as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why—despite or because these topoi are hostile—they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27019 /37019 Holocaust Object

(ANTH 23910 / ANTH 35035 / ARCH 27019 / HIST 23413 / HIST 33413 / JWSC 29500)

In this course, we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented during World War II. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos and extermination and concentration camps. These sites which—once the locations of genocide—are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preservation, which we view through a prism of authenticity. In order to study representation, we critically engage a textual and visual reading of museum narrations and fiction writings; to tackle the demands of preservation, we apply a neo-materialist approach. Of special interest are survivors’ testimonies as appended to the artifacts they donated. The course will also equip you with salient critical tools for future creative research in Holocaust studies.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27025 /37025 Polish Modernist Literature

TBD

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27035 /37035 Gender, Agency, and Power in 19th C Russian Literature

(GNSE 20118)

When members of Pussy Riot performed their “Punk Prayer” at the Cathedral of Christ Our Savior in Moscow in 2011, heads covered with neon balaclavas, it was as much the scandal of their female bodies in front of the iconostasis as the words of their song that constituted their protest against state and church. This course focuses on similarly scandalous provocations and quieter acts of resistance against normative gender expectations in 19th-century Russian literature. We read narratives of rebellion by individuals and collective actions by groups of women, and consider the surprising agency attributed to women’s cooperative work in Russian literature as well as the heavy burdens placed on women by family, state, and church. Readings include primarily short fiction in a variety of genres (sentimental, romantic, realist, and gothic) by canonized male writers and by women writers of the 19th C who are less often taught and translated, but were widely read in their own day. These works expand our understanding of the narrative possibilities for sexuality and gendered subjectivity in the Russian literary sphere, and of the ways in which possibility itself was made and remade by literary expression. The course also introduces students to methods of literary analysis informed by critical theories of gender, and asks how Russian literary and cultural history may offer new ways of thinking about gendered bodies, performance, and interrelations in the 19th C and today.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(ANTH 25908 / ANTH 35908 / CMLT 23301 / CMLT 33301 / NEHC 20568 / NEHC 30568)

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments and a living epic tradition.This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political and anthropological, perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition first-hand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: A Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(CMLT 23401 / CMLT 33401 / HIST 24005 / HIST 34005 / NEHC 20573 / NEHC 30573)

What makes it possible for the imagined communities called nations to command the emotional attachments that they do? This course considers some possible answers to Benedict Anderson’s question on the basis of material from the Balkans. We will examine the transformation of the scenario of paradise, loss, and redemption into a template for a national identity narrative through which South East European nations retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Žižek’s theory of the subject as constituted by trauma and Kant’s notion of the sublime, we will contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29021 /39021 The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov

(FNDL 29020 )

“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. . . . Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art, and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as the subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand The Master and Margarita.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveillance

(CMLT 29024 / CMLT 39024 )

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance--the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29035 /39035 Empathetic Sorrows: Recent Bulgarian Literature

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29045 /39045 Dostoevsky and Critical Theory

(CMLT 29045 / CMLT 39045)

The tormented, obsessed, and sadistic characters of Dostoevsky’s novels posed a challenge to positivism and reason too scandalous and compelling to be ignored. The novels inspired some of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the fields of religion, philosophy, psychology and literary theory. We will read two of Dostoevsky’s philosophically challenging novels alongside works by these critics and philosophers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Levinas. While exploring their ideas about faith and unbelief, madness and reason, violence and torture, society and history, we will also inquire into the relationships among literature, philosophy and biography and examine the processes of influence and adaptation.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29071 /39071 Magic Nations

(CMLT 29071)

As part of the post-colonial turn, magic realism is a hybrid mode of narration rejects, overcomes, and offers an alternative to the colonial, Enlightenment episteme. It mobilizes the imaginations and narrative modes of pre-colonial pasts in the articulation of new, post-colonial, often national, selves. In this course, we will unpack some captivating narratives from Southeast Europe in which the visions of the pre-modern mythic worlds emerge as the magic, transcendent core of the modern nations. We will indulge in the sheer enjoyment of the brilliance of these text while focusing on the paradoxes they embody – for example, the simultaneous rejection and reliance on the realist mode, the colonial worldview, and its civilizational hierarchies and models.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29155 /39155 From Chekhov to Chernobyl: Russian Literature of Environmental Catastrophe

(ENST 29155)

What is it that made the fact of anthropogenic climate change “unthinkable” in the 20th century, and what ideas might allow us to think past what Amitav Ghosh calls this “great derangement”? Environmental degradation and disaster provide a steady backdrop to the 20th century in Russia and the Soviet Union. With control over one sixth of the world’s land mass, the Russian and Soviet Empires exploited the seemingly inexhaustible natural resources of the country’s territory via industrialization, collectivization, forced migration and a vast system of prison camps and internal exile. While the Soviet regime promised mastery over nature, and Russian culture valorized the harmonization of humans with the natural world, environmental catastrophe, both sudden and cumulative, proved the folly of those dreams. Though the Soviet narrative of unflagging progress towards an industrialized utopia rendered these follies unmentionable, imaginative literature provides an indelible record of their costs. We will read works by authors who have grappled with this ongoing catastrophe and its implications for relations between human beings and the world. How might the cultural legacies of communism reframe some of the most vital questions for our shared planetary future? We will examine the ecological thinking of writers and filmmakers including Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Vernadsky, Andrey Platonov, Valentin Rasputin, Larisa Shepitko, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Svetlana Alexievich.

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 29910 /39910 Special Topics in Advanced Russian

(REES 29910 / REES 39910)

Class meets for 2 hours each week. We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor.

2021-2022 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 29911 /39911 Special Topics in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

(REES 29914 / REES 39914)

The course is designed to meet the specific needs of advanced learners of B/C/S, including heritage and native speakers, and to foster cross-cultural experiences through its interdisciplinary content. The curriculum covers a wide range of topics relative to the students’ field of study, research and personal interests. Although grounded in the field of philology, it expands students’ knowledge in other disciplines of social and behavioral sciences such as history, anthropology, global studies, economics, political science, sociology, and the like. Attention is given to the ability to paraphrase scholarly arguments, formulate research hypotheses, and present one’s research in the target language. The course delves into advanced grammatical topics with the goal of increasing proficiency in both aural and reading comprehension, in addition to honing writing and speaking styles. Classes are conducted in B/C/S; the prerequisite is three years of formal study of the target language or the equivalent.

2021-2022 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 10103 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

This three-quarter sequence course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages introduces students to the basics of four basic skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It maintains a good balance of the three languages, their respective grammatical and lexical differences, and the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Students are encouraged to concentrate on the language and culture of their interest and choice. The course objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of the spoken and written languages, while simultaneously working on basic interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural communication. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, dialogues and texts and, reinforced by the students and instructor, screenings of short announcements, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and the like. Once a week, one-on-one 15-minute conversation sessions with the instructor offer students the opportunity to review and practice the materials presented in class. The course is supplemented with cultural events, guest speakers and selected media. Together with the conversation sessions, these supplements improve the students’ ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds— essential for establishing successful, positive relationships across cultural boundaries.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 First-Year Russian I

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This year-long course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103 First-Year Polish I

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g., communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

CZEC 10103 First-Year Czech I

This course introduces the Czech language to those students who would like to speak Czech or use the language for reading and research purposes. All four major communicative skills (i.e. reading, writing, listening, speaking) are stressed. Students will also learn about Czech culture through readings, films and class activities. This three- quarter sequence prepares students for the second-year Czech course and to study or travel abroad in the Czech Republic. Conversation practice is held weekly.

Irena Cajkova
2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10203 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

This three-quarter sequence course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages introduces students to the basics of four basic skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It maintains a good balance of the three languages, their respective grammatical and lexical differences, and the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Students are encouraged to concentrate on the language and culture of their interest and choice. The course objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of the spoken and written languages, while simultaneously working on basic interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural communication. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, dialogues and texts and, reinforced by the students and instructor, screenings of short announcements, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and the like. Once a week, one-on-one 15-minute conversation sessions with the instructor offer students the opportunity to review and practice the materials presented in class. The course is supplemented with cultural events, guest speakers and selected media. Together with the conversation sessions, these supplements improve the students’ ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds— essential for establishing successful, positive relationships across cultural boundaries.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10203 First-Year Russian II

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All five major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, comprehension, and speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 10203 First-Year Czech II

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

Irena Cajkova
2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 10203 First-Year Polish II

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student’s level of preparation. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10303 First-Year Russian III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

CZEC 10303 First-Year Czech III

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

Irena Cajkova
2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10303 First-Year Polish III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Poli 10203 or consent of instructor.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian III

This three-quarter sequence course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages introduces students to the basics of four basic skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It maintains a good balance of the three languages, their respective grammatical and lexical differences, and the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Students are encouraged to concentrate on the language and culture of their interest and choice. The course objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of the spoken and written languages, while simultaneously working on basic interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural communication. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, dialogues and texts and, reinforced by the students and instructor, screenings of short announcements, commercials, documentaries, interviews, and the like. Once a week, one-on-one 15-minute conversation sessions with the instructor offer students the opportunity to review and practice the materials presented in class. The course is supplemented with cultural events, guest speakers and selected media. Together with the conversation sessions, these supplements improve the students’ ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds— essential for establishing successful, positive relationships across cultural boundaries.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10400 Russian through Pushkin I

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin’s shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Not open to students who have taken RUSS 10100-10200-10300.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10500 Russian through Pushkin II

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin’s shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Not open to students who have taken RUSS 10100-10200-10300.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10600 Russian through Pushkin III

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin’s shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Not open to students who have taken RUSS 10100-10200-10300.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

REES 20004 Lolita

( FNDL 25300 / ENGL 28916 / GNSE 24900 / SIGN 26027)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 20103 Second-Year Russian I

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

The Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures course is designed for both students who have completed the first- year sequence and heritage learners. Its main objective is to develop further communicative skills—interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural—using authentic materials representing the contemporary spoken and written language in authentic cultural contexts. Students are presented with a series of texts, such as newspaper articles, interviews with writers, actors, athletes, short biographies, book and film reviews, university websites, travel blogs, etc. Audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced and developed throughout the quarter. Textual and audiovisual materials are selected to best exemplify the outlined themes while maintaining a good balance of the three languages and their respective grammatical and lexical differences in order to assess students’ progress in all four skills. Each of the 12 units is accompanied with a unit test, all of which, including the final exam at the end of the term, mirror the tasks in the practical proficiency assessment test that students can take at the end of the spring quarter. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers and cultural events. The prerequisite is BCSN 10303 or the equivalent.

BCSN 10303 or consent of instructor

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20103 Second-Year Polish I

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10300 or equivalent

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20203 Second-Year Polish II

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20203 Second-Year Russian II

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategics are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practices is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20203 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

The Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures course is designed for both students who have completed the first- year sequence and heritage learners. Its main objective is to develop further communicative skills—interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural—using authentic materials representing the contemporary spoken and written language in authentic cultural contexts. Students are presented with a series of texts, such as newspaper articles, interviews with writers, actors, athletes, short biographies, book and film reviews, university websites, travel blogs, etc. Audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced and developed throughout the quarter. Textual and audiovisual materials are selected to best exemplify the outlined themes while maintaining a good balance of the three languages and their respective grammatical and lexical differences in order to assess students’ progress in all four skills. Each of the 12 units is accompanied with a unit test, all of which, including the final exam at the end of the term, mirror the tasks in the practical proficiency assessment test that students can take at the end of the spring quarter. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers and cultural events. The prerequisite is BCSN 10303 or the equivalent.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian III

The Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures course is designed for both students who have completed the first- year sequence and heritage learners. Its main objective is to develop further communicative skills—interpretive, interpersonal, presentational and intercultural—using authentic materials representing the contemporary spoken and written language in authentic cultural contexts. Students are presented with a series of texts, such as newspaper articles, interviews with writers, actors, athletes, short biographies, book and film reviews, university websites, travel blogs, etc. Audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced and developed throughout the quarter. Textual and audiovisual materials are selected to best exemplify the outlined themes while maintaining a good balance of the three languages and their respective grammatical and lexical differences in order to assess students’ progress in all four skills. Each of the 12 units is accompanied with a unit test, all of which, including the final exam at the end of the term, mirror the tasks in the practical proficiency assessment test that students can take at the end of the spring quarter. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers and cultural events. The prerequisite is BCSN 10303 or the equivalent.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20303 Second-Year Polish III

The primary goal of second year Polish is to expand the student’s speaking, reading and writing skills by building on grammar and vocabulary learned during the first year of study. As a complement to the linguistic side of the course, the student will gain a greater familiarity with Polish history and culture through varied means including readings of literary works, articles from contemporary Polish newspapers and movies.

Fall Quarter of Second Year Polish or instructor consent

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20303 Second-Year Russian III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 Third-Year Russian through Culture I

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20300 (two years of Russian) or equivalent

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20802 Third-Year Russian through Culture II

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20902 Third-Year Russian through Culture III

(REES 20902)

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

Russian 20701 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

REES 24423 Russian Encounters with Blackness: History, Literature, Politics

This course provides a historical, literary, and political survey of Russia’s encounters with black peoples, from the reign of Peter the Great to the administration of Vladimir Putin. Drawing on a variety of sources, including novels, autobiographies, film, media reports, and contemporary scholarly research, the course explores the concepts of race, belonging, and otherness/duality as they evolved in the varying historical contexts of Russia’s encounters with “blackness.” Particular attention is paid to comparisons of racialization and racial injustice in America and in Russia, as gleaned from the biographies of black “Russophiles” such as Frederick Bruce Thomas and Paul Robeson, as well as from the memoirs and writings of figures such as Alexander Pushkin, Langston Hughes, and Yelena Khanga. From classic Russian literature, to Soviet propaganda, to contemporary geopolitics, the course asks: How has “blackness” been historically understood and/or used by Russians, and what cultural and political legacies has that left in Russia’s post-imperial and post-Soviet space?

Christy Monet
2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26011 Introduction to Russian Civilization I

(HIST 13900 / SOSC 24000)

The first quarter covers the ninth century to the 1870s; the second quarter continues on through the post-Soviet period. Working closely with a variety of primary sources—from oral legends to film and music, from political treatises to literary masterpieces—we will track the evolution of Russian civilization over the centuries and through radically different political regimes. Topics to be discussed include the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western culture in Russian civilization; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual, and cultural life; the relationship between center and periphery; systems of social and political legitimization; and symbols and practices of collective identity.

Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29976 XCAP: The Narratives and Aesthetics of Contagion: Knowledge Formation in the Time of COVID-19

(KNOW 29976)

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event in our lifetimes, one that has permeated our personal, national, and global discourse about health, disease, and dying. From individual fears and anxieties, to community lockdowns, to the steady march of infection and death statistics, the pandemic is everywhere, and we have been inundated with images and information about the virus, its contagious spread, and the impact on our society. Yet what do we make of all of this information? Where does it come from? And how does it help us understand the current moment? This course will explore how (dis)information about the virus and pandemic is created, disseminated, and shapes our perceptions, with a particular focus on narratives and aesthetics within a variety of information ecosystems. We will explore, in a broadly chronological format, important narratives and iconography that emerged and continue to evolve during the course of the ongoing pandemic and that contribute to our individual and collective understanding of social, cultural, political, and scientific aspects of the pandemic. We will further consider how this information relates to personal and collective knowledge formation that subsequently informs our attitudes about and behaviors during the pandemic. In particular, we will discuss how medical knowledge is formed and used to care for patients within a rapidly changing clinical environment. Clinical and public health ethics will provide an important framework for assessing and understanding this information within a medical context, including the ethics of quarantine, scarce resource allocation, vaccine creation, and mandated behaviors (masking, stay-at-home). Materials that we will draw upon include: medical and scientific literature, mainstream media print and video, and materials that exist on the fringe of mainstream media. Assignments will focus on interrogating personal sources of information and how that information contributes to personal knowledge formation about the pandemic.

William Nickell, Brian Callender
2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20000 /30000 Tolstoy's Late Works

(FNDL 22850 / RLIT 32900 / RLST 28501)

This course examines the works written by Tolstoy after Anna Karenina, when he abandoned the novel as a form and gave up his copyright. Readings include his influential writings on non-violence and vegetarianism, his challenges to church and state authority, as well as later literary works, which some believe surpass the famous novels he had renounced. We will also explore the particularities of Tolstoy’s charisma in these years, when he came to be viewed as a second Tsar in Russia and as a moral authority throughout the world.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 21302 /30102 Advanced Russian through Media I

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters). Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21402 /30202 Advanced Russian through Media II

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format).

Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor. Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters).

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21502 /30302 Adv Russian Through Media-III

(REES 21502 / REES 30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 21101 /31104 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Fiction

(REES 21101 / REES 31104)

This one quarter course is designed to help students over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training—the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited literary texts. The selected pieces of fiction and the exercises drawn from them engage the language’s structure on every page. Immersed in a complete language experience, students learn how to engage the natural, organic language of literary texts across a variety of styles and themes enabling them to work with ever more challenging material. The course objective is to hone students’ abilities to analyze increasingly complex unrevised texts, identify various styles and registers of the language, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations in both spoken and written format. Attention is given to improving students’ abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize and discuss abstract topics. Building vocabulary is stressed as a key to making progress, while issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course. Classes are conducted in the target language and may be taken for pass/fail. The prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language or the equivalent.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 /31203 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language Through Film

(REES 21200 / REES 31203)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. This course addresses the theme of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav identity through discussion and interpretation based on selected films, documentaries, images, and related texts—historical and literary, popular press, advertisements, screenplays, and literature e on film. Emphasis is on interpersonal communication as well as the interpretation and production of language in written and oral forms. The course engages in systematic grammar review, along with introduction of some new linguistic topics, with constant practice in writing and vocabulary enrichment. The syllabus includes the screening of six films, each from a different director, region, and period, starting with Cinema Komunisto (2012), a documentary by Mila Turajlic. This film will be crucial for understanding how Yugoslav cinema was born and how, in its origins, it belongs to what a later cinephile, Fredric Jameson, has called a “geopolitical aesthetic.” We shall investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema, and pay close attention to aesthetic conceptions and concrete formal properties, and more importantly, to language, narrative logic, and style.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 21300 /31303 (Re)Branding the Balkan City:Contemp. Belgrade/Sarajevo/Zagreb

(ARCH 21300 / ARTH 21333 / ARTH 31333 / GLST 21301 / HIST 24008 / REES 21300 / REES 31303)

The course uses an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, infrastructure and transformations of cities, mainly the capitals of today’s Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia. There is a particular need to survey this region and feed the newfound interest in it, mainly because Yugoslav architecture embodied one of the great political experiments of the modern era. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, urban life as praxis, art and design movements, film, music, food, architectural histories and styles, metropolitan citizenship, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. One of them is a tour through the 2018 show at MoMA “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980” a project curated with the goal to find a place for Yugoslav Modernism in the architectural canon. Classes are held in English. No knowledge of South Slavic languages is required.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 21400 /31403 Advanced BCS: Language through Art and Architecture

(REES 21400 / REES 31403)

This course foregrounds different periods in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav art and architecture. Situated between the capitalist West and the socialist East, Yugoslavia’s architects responded to contradictory demands and influences, developing a postwar architecture both in line with and distinct from the design approaches seen elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Drawing on the country’s own idiosyncrasies, diverse heritage and influences, the course surveys examples of architectural styles from classical to Baroque, through Art Nouveau and Modernism, all the way to full-blown Brutalism with its heft and material honesty. Given that Yugoslav architecture also expressed one of the great political experiments of the modern era, the course entertains many questions on related topics. While exploring major cities, their infrastructure, houses, buildings, monuments, churches and more, the course delves into advanced grammatical topics with the goal of increasing proficiency in both aural and reading comprehension, in addition to honing writing and speaking styles. Classes are conducted in the target language and may be taken for pass/fail. The prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language or the equivalent.

The course prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language(s) or the consent of the instructor.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Language

REES 23154 /33154 The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities

This course will examine attempts to build harmonious sustainable communities in the U.S., U.S.S.R., and around the world. Our content will be historical, philosophical and literary, and will include communal charters, purpose statements, and architectural plans— alongside testimonies to success and memoirs of failure. We will identify patterns and principles that differentiate communal societies from those surrounding them, and consider the relationship of these to the systematic failures and successes of experiments in alternative living. We will also consider the personalities involved: of the founders, stalwart communards, wandering seekers, and troublemakers. We will ask the hard questions that these communities have continually faced, considering how shared space transforms shared beliefs and aspirations, why the latter have been so difficult to sustain, and how the commune could be made to work.

The first twenty students signing up for the option will also have the opportunity to charter and try out, in groups of four, their own two-week experiments in communal living in an apartment dedicated to the course. Please contact the instructor to be placed on this list.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 23812 /33812 Russia and the West, 18th–21st Centuries

(HIST 23812 / HIST 33812)

There are few problems as enduring and central to Russian history as the question of the West--Russia's most passionate romance and most bitter letdown. In this course we will read and think about Russia from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries through the lens of this obsession. We will study the products of Russian interactions with the West: constitutional projects, paintings, scientific and economic thought, the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy, and revolutions. We will consider the presence of European communities in Russia: German and British migrants who filled important niches in state service, trade, and scholarship; Italian sculptors and architects who designed some of Russia's most famous monuments; French expatriates in the wake of the French Revolution; Communist workers and intellectuals, refugees from Nazi Germany; and Western journalists who, in the late Soviet decades, trafficked illicit ideas, texts, and artworks. In the end, we will follow émigré Russians to Europe and the United States and return to present-day Russia to examine the anti-Western turn in its political and cultural discourse.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24110 /34110 The Soviet Empire

(CMLT 24111 / CMLT 34111 / CRES 24111 / CRES 34111 / NEHC 24110 / NEHC 34110)

What kind of empire was the Soviet Union? Focusing on the central idea of Eurasia, we will explore how discourses of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity operated under the multinational empire. How did communism shape the state's regulation of the bodies of its citizens? How did genres from the realist novel to experimental film challenge a cohesive patriarchal, Russophone vision of Soviet Eurasia? We will examine how writers and filmmakers in the Caucasus and Central Asia answered Soviet Orientalist imaginaries, working through an interdisciplinary archive drawing literature and film from the Soviet colonial 'periphery' in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as writings about the hybrid conception of Eurasia across linguistics, anthropology, and geography.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 25502 /35502 The Russian Novel

(FNDL 25334)

The course will focus on three of the greatest philosophical crime novels in modern literature: Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bely’s Peterburg. Together they chart the course of development of the Russian novel, engaging literature’s essential questions, but also its “accursed” ones, as the Russians say—the ones that can never be answered, but provoke the most worthy of sort of debate.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 25603 /35603 Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump

(SIGN 26029)

For the past four years we've been transfixed by the news—but also by the way the news has been reported. Longstanding practices have been questioned or abandoned as our media have grappled with how to cover a changing political landscape.  A similar situation unfolded in late and post-Soviet Russia, where it seemed that newspapers and TVs were not only reporting, but also carrying out, a regime change.  This course will examine media regimes in both the U.S. and Russia (and the U.S.S.R.), with careful attention to historical and theoretical frameworks that will help us better understand current media events. On the Russian side we will explore how political and cultural regimes have systematically exploited the gap between experience and representation to create their own mediated worlds—from the tight censorship of the imperial and Soviet periods to the propaganda of the Soviet period and the recent use of media simulacra for strategic geopolitical advantage. We will compare this tradition with that of the United States, where freedom of expression has been privileged, but has also been shaped and distorted by the economic and cultural markets that constitute our media.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26660 /36661 The Rise of the Global New Right

(CMLT 26660 / CMLT 36660 / CRES 26660 / CRES 36660 / ENGL 26660 / ENGL 36661 / SIGN 26050)

This course traces the intellectual genealogies of the rise of a Global New Right in relation to the contexts of late capitalist neoliberalism and the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the rise of social media. The course will explore the intertwining political and intellectual histories of the Russian Eurasianist movement, Hungarian Jobbik, the American Traditional Workers Party, the French GRECE, Greek Golden Dawn, and others through their published essays, blogs, vlogs, and social media. Perhaps most importantly, the course asks: can we use the f-word (fascism) to describe this problem? In order to pose this question we will explore the aesthetic concerns of the New Right in relation to postmodern theory, and the affective politics of nationalism. This course thus frames the rise of a global New Right interdisciplinarily and comparatively as a historical, geopolitical, and aesthetic problem.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27019 /37019 Holocaust Object

(ANTH 23910 / ANTH 35035 / HIST 23413 / HIST 33413 / JWSC 29500 )

In this course, we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented during World War II. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos and extermination and concentration camps. These sites which—once the locations of genocide—are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preservation, which we view through a prism of authenticity. In order to study representation, we critically engage a textual and visual reading of museum narrations and fiction writings; to tackle the demands of preservation, we apply a neo-materialist approach. Of special interest are survivors’ testimonies as appended to the artifacts they donated. The course will also equip you with salient critical tools for future creative research in Holocaust studies.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27021 /37021 The Rise and Demise of Polish Chicago: Reading Polonia’s Material Culture

(ARCH 27021)

Chicago claims to have the largest Polish and Polish-American population in the US and yet the city’s distinctly Polish neighborhoods are now only history as their population has dispersed or moved to the suburbs. This course explores the diminishing presence of Poles against the lasting input of the material culture which they introduced to the urban spaces of Chicago. The course is framed by the fundamentals of thing discourse and employs the mediums of sculpture, fashion, photography, architecture and topography of the Polish community in Chicago through several field trips. The course’s main goal is to map the evolution of the former Polish neighborhoods which often concluded with the erasure of their distinct ethno-space. In order to grasp the status of such changes, students take several field trips to the former Polish neighborhoods and visit their existing architectural landmarks and cultural institutions.

Towards the end of the course, students conduct several interviews with Polish Chicagoans from the postwar and Solidarity immigrations. The course concludes with a capstone project for which students will make a virtual collection of artifacts designed as a curio cabinet filled with objects they found, created, and purchased during their research and field trips.

Students must attend several panels of their choice during the conference entitled, “What They Brought / What They Changed: Material Culture and Polish Chicago,” on December 2-4, 2020.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27026 /37026 Kieslowski: The Decalogue

(CMST 26705 / CMST 36705 / FNDL 24003)

In this course, we study the monumental series "The Decalogue" by one of the most influential filmmakers from Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Without mechanically relating the films to the Ten Commandments, Kieślowski explores the relevance of the biblical moral rules to the state of modern man forced to make ethical choices. Each part of the series contests the absolutism of moral axioms through narrative twists and reversals in a wide, universalized sphere. An analysis of the films will be accompanied by readings from Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, including criticism by Zizek, Insdorf, and others.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(ANTH 25908 / ANTH 35908 / CMLT 23301 / CMLT 33301 / NEHC 20568 / NEHC 30568)

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments and a living epic tradition.This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political and anthropological, perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition first-hand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29010 /39010 Strangers to Ourselves: Emigre Literature and Film from Russia and Southeast Europe

(CMLT 26912 / CMLT 36912 )

"Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: A Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(CMLT 23401 / CMLT 33401 / HIST 24005 / HIST 34005 / NEHC 20573 / NEHC 30573)

What makes it possible for the imagined communities called nations to command the emotional attachments that they do?  This course considers some possible answers to Benedict Anderson’s question on the basis of material from the Balkans. We will examine the transformation of the scenario of paradise, loss, and redemption into a template for a national identity narrative through which South East European nations retell their Ottoman past.  With the help of Žižek’s theory of the subject as constituted by trauma and Kant’s notion of the sublime, we will contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29021 /39021 The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov

(FNDL 29020)

“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. . . . Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art, and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as the subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand The Master and Margarita.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29023 /39023 Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest

(CMLT 29023 / CMLT 39023 / HIST 23609 / HIST 33609 / NEHC 29023 / NEHC 39023)

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself—self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization—and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveilance

(CMLT 29024 / CMLT 39024)

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance--the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 29910 /39910 Special Topics in Advanced Russian

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor. Class meets for 2 hours each week. We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 42101 Collapse: The End of the Soviet Empire

(CDIN 42101 / CMLT 42101 / HIST 43802 )

This team-taught course invites students to reassess critically the meaning of the Soviet collapse on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary. Topics to be examined include the neoliberal "shock therapy" economic reforms that ushered in a state of wild capitalism, the dissolution of the Soviet empire and rise of rise of new right nationalisms, and the formation of alternative artistic movements that resisted the economic and political devastation that accompanied the transition. The course pedagogy employs economic, political, historical, and aesthetic analysis to develop a robust understanding across a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches.

Consent required for undergraduate enrollment; email Professors Feldman and Hillis a paragraph long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.

2020-2021 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 44003 Colloquium: Lost Histories of the Left

(HIST 44003)

When most Americans think about "the left," Marxism, Soviet state socialism, or European social democracy spring to mind. This class will explore alternative—but now largely forgotten—blueprints for revolutionizing the political and social order that emerged in the nineteenth century. We will pay special attention to utopian socialism, early anticolonial movements, the Jewish Labor Bund, and anarchism. Examining the intellectual underpinnings of these movements, their influence on the modern world, and the factors that led to their demise, we will also consider what lessons they can teach to those committed to realizing a better future today.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 10103 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

In this introductory course of a three-course sequence in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103 First-Year Polish I

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 First-Year Russian-1

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This year-long course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10203 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

In this introductory course of a three-course sequence in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

BCSN 10100 or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 10203 First-Year Polish II

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Poli 10103 or equivalent; Drill sessions to be arranged.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10203 First-Year Russian-2

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This year-long course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10303 First-Year Russian-3

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This year-long course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

BCSN 10203 or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10303 First-Year Polish III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Poli 10203 or equivalent; Drill sessions to be arranged.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

The first quarter is devoted to an overview of grammar, with emphasis on verbal morphology and syntax, through the reading of a series of literary texts in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20103 Second-Year Polish I

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10303 or equivalent; Drill sessions to be arranged.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 Second-Year Russian I

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20203 Second-Year Polish II

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 20103 or equivalent; Drill sessions to be arranged.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20203 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

The second and third quarters are devoted to further developing active mastery of Bosian/Croatian/Serbian through continued readings, grammar drills, compositions, and conversational practice. Study of word formation, nominal and adjectival morphology, and syntax are emphasized. Screenings of movies and other audio-visual materials are held in addition to scheduled class time.

BCSN 10303 or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20203 Second-Year Russian II

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20303 Second-Year Russian III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian-3

The second and third quarters are devoted to further developing active mastery of Bosian/Croatian/Serbian through continued readings, grammar drills, compositions, and conversational practice. Study of word formation, nominal and adjectival morphology, and syntax are emphasized. Screenings of movies and other audio-visual materials are held in addition to scheduled class time.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20303 Second-Year Polish III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 20203 or equivalent; Drill sessions to be arranged.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 Third-Year Russian through Culture I

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20802 Third-Year Russian through Culture II

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21600 Russian For Heritage Learners

This course examines the major aspects of Russian grammar and stylistics essential for heritage learners. Students engage in close readings and discussions of short stories by classic and contemporary Russian authors (e.g., Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Platonov, Bulgakov, Erofeev, Tolstaya), with special emphasis on their linguistic and stylistic differences. All work in Russian.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 23108 Contact Linguistics

(LING 26310; LING 36310)

This seminar focuses on current research in contact linguistics in a global perspective, including but not limited to the impact of languages of wider communication (e.g. English, Russian) in contact with other languages. Topics to be covered include the following: language/dialect contact, convergence and language shift resulting in attrition and language endangerment and loss. Other contact-induced linguistic changes and processes to be considered include borrowing, code-switching, code-shifting, diglossia, loss of linguistic restrictions and grammatical permeability, and the impact of language contact in the emergence and/or historical development of languages.

LING 20001 or consent of instructor

Salikoko Mufwene
2019-2020 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 23708 Soviet History Through Literature

(HIST 23708)

This course considers the main themes of Soviet history through canonical works of fiction, with an occasional addition of excerpts from autobiographies, memories, and police files.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24007 Chernobyl: Bodies And Nature After Disaster

(ENST 24007; GNSE 24007; HIST 24007)

When reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded, it quickly made headlines around the world. Swedes found radiation in their air, Germans in their milk, Greeks in their grain, and Britons in their sheep. Ukrainians and Belarusians found it in their rain, wind, water sources, homes, and in their children's thyroids. Americans worried about finding it in their bodies, especially in pregnant or fetal bodies. A lot of roads led to the Chernobyl disaster: the Soviet state system, to be sure, but also the Cold War arms race, a faith in scientific progress shared in East and West, and a global disregard for the natural world and the human body. This course will follow those roads to the climax of the explosion and then examine the many paths out of Chernobyl: the disaster's aftereffects on geopolitics, environmentalism, feminism, and body politics. We will draw on a recent outpouring of scholarly and popular works on Chernobyl, including books, podcasts, and television series. We will also read texts on feminism, environmentalism, and other nuclear disasters, Cold War histories, and fiction to provide context and sites for further inquiry.

Peggy O'Donnell
2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24420 Russian Short Fiction: Experiments in Form

Russian literature is known for the sweeping epics that Henry James once dubbed the "loose baggy monsters." However, in addition to the famed 'doorstop novels,' the Russian literary canon also has a long tradition of innovative short fiction-of short stories and novellas that experiment with forms of storytelling and narration. This course focuses on such works, as well as the narrative strategies and formal devices that allow these short stories and novellas to be both effective and economical. Throughout the quarter, we will read short fiction from a variety of Russian authors and examine the texts that establish the tradition of Russian short fiction as well as those that push its boundaries. We will attend to the formal characteristics of these texts, analyze their approach to storytelling, and ultimately question what these texts reveal about our appetite for narrative. Authors sampled include: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Platonov, Nabokov, Tolstaya, and many others! No prior knowledge of Russian language or literature is required.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24421 Women's Work: Agents of Change in Central and Eastern Europe

This course explores the role of women in both making and unmaking socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. While we begin with women's direct engagement in political discourse and government, the scope of the course will expand to engage with women writers, artists, performers, scholars, and dissidents who drove social change through the twentieth century in the Eastern Bloc.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26011 Introduction to Russian Civilization I

(HIST 13900,SOSC 24000)

The first quarter covers the ninth century to the 1870s; the second quarter continues on through the post-Soviet period. Working closely with a variety of primary sources-from oral legends to film and music, from political treatises to literary masterpieces-we will track the evolution of Russian civilization over the centuries and through radically different political regimes. Topics to be discussed include the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western culture in Russian civilization; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual and cultural life; the relationship between center and periphery; systems of social and political legitimization; and symbols and practices of collective identity.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26012 Introduction to Russian Civilization II

(HIST 14000; SOSC 24100)

The first quarter covers the ninth century to the 1870s; the second quarter continues on through the post-Soviet period. Working closely with a variety of primary sources—from oral legends to film and music, from political treatises to literary masterpieces—we will track the evolution of Russian civilization over the centuries and through radically different political regimes. Topics to be discussed include the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western culture in Russian civilization; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual, and cultural life; the relationship between center and periphery; systems of social and political legitimization; and symbols and practices of collective identity.

Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20001 /30001 War and Peace

(CMLT 22301; CMLT 32301; ENGL 28912; ENGL 32302; FNDL 27103; HIST 23704)

Tolstoy’s novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world’s great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 21302 /30102 Advanced Russian through Media I

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters). Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21402 /30202 Advanced Russian through Media II

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters). Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21502 /30302 Adv Russian Through Media-3

(REES 21502, REES 30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Russian 21302 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20902 /30902 Third-Year Russian through Culture III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Language

REES 21002 /31002 Kieslowski's French Cinema

(CMST 34405,FNDL 25312,CMST 24405,CMLT 24405)

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, White, Red turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema. We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one's identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker's dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker's contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screen scripts, Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 21101 /31104 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Fiction

(REES 21101,REES 31104)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. Language through Fiction is designed to help students and instructors over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training-the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited texts. Literature represents the greatest development of the expressive possibilities of a language and reveals the bounds within which language operates. The texts will immerse motivated language students in a complete language experience, as the passages and related exercises present the language's structure on every page. Students will learn how to engage the natural, organic language of a literary text across a variety of styles and themes. The course assumes that students are familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary, as well as both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. It is particularly appealing to students who are interested in the literature, history, and anthropology of the region. Equivalent Course(s): REES 31103,BCSN 31101,REES 21100

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21101 /31104 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Fiction

(REES 21101, BCSN 31104, REES 31104)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. Language through Fiction is designed to help students and instructors over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training-the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited texts. Literature represents the greatest development of the expressive possibilities of a language and reveals the bounds within which language operates. The texts will immerse motivated language students in a complete language experience, as the passages and related exercises present the language's structure on every page. Students will learn how to engage the natural, organic language of a literary text across a variety of styles and themes. The course assumes that students are familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary, as well as both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. It is particularly appealing to students who are interested in the literature, history, and anthropology of the region. Equivalent Course(s): REES 31103,BCSN 31101,REES 21100

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 /31203 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Film

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. This course addresses the theme of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav identity through discussion and interpretation based on selected films, documentaries, images, and related texts-historical and literary, popular press, advertisements, screenplays, and literature e on film. Emphasis is on interpersonal communication as well as the interpretation and production of language in written and oral forms. The course engages in systematic grammar review, along with introduction of some new linguistic topics, with constant practice in writing and vocabulary enrichment. The syllabus includes the screening of six films, each from a different director, region, and period, starting with Cinema Komunisto (2012), a documentary by Mila Turajlic. This film will be crucial for understanding how Yugoslav cinema was born and how, in its origins, it belongs to what a later cinephile, Fredric Jameson, has called a "geopolitical aesthetic." We shall investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema, and pay close attention to aesthetic conceptions and concrete formal properties, and more importantly, to language, narrative logic, and style.

BCSN 20300 or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 21300 /31303 (Re)Branding the Balkan City: Comtemp. Belgrade/Sarajevo/Zagreb

(REES 21300,REES 31303)

The course will use an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, infrastructure, and transformations of these three cities, now the capitals of Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we will consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, urban life as praxis, art and design movements, architectural histories and styles, metropolitan citizenship, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. Classes are held in English. No knowledge of BCS is required. However, this module can fulfill a language requirement or simply further the study of BCS with additional weekly sections, materials, discussions, and presentations in the target language.

BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 23812 /33812 Russia and the West, 18th-21st Centuries

(HIST 23812,HIST 33812,REES 33812)

There are few problems as enduring and central to Russian history as the question of the West-Russia's most passionate romance and most bitter letdown. In this course we will read and think about Russia from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries through the lens of this obsession. We will study the products of Russian interactions with the West: constitutional projects, paintings, scientific and economic thought, the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy, and revolutions. We will consider the presence of European communities in Russia: German and British migrants who filled important niches in state service, trade, and scholarship; Italian sculptors and architects who designed some of Russia's most famous monuments; French expatriates in the wake of the French Revolution; Communist workers and intellectuals, refugees from Nazi Germany; and Western journalists who, in the late Soviet decades, trafficked illicit ideas, texts, and artworks. In the end, we will follow émigré Russians to Europe and the United States and return to present-day Russia to examine the anti-Western turn in its political and cultural discourse.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24110 /34110 The Soviet Empire

(CMLT 24111,NEHC 24110,NEHC 34110,CMLT 34111,REES 34110)

What kind of empire was the Soviet Union? Focusing on the central idea of Eurasia, we will explore how discourses of gender, sexuality and ethnicity operated under the multinational empire. How did communism shape the state's regulation of the bodies of its citizens? How did genres from the realist novel to experimental film challenge a cohesive patriarchal, Russophone vision of Soviet Eurasia? We will examine how writers and filmmakers in the Caucasus and Central Asia answered Soviet Orientalist imaginaries, working through an interdisciplinary archive drawing literature and film from the Soviet colonial 'periphery' in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as writings about the hybrid conception of Eurasia across linguistics, anthropology, and geography.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26660 /36661 The Rise of the Global New Right

(CMLT 26660,CMLT 36660,ENGL 26660,SIGN 26050,CRES 26660,CRES 36660,ENGL 36661)

This course traces the intellectual genealogies of the rise of a Global New Right in relation to the contexts of late capitalist neoliberalism, the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the rise of social media. The course will explore the intertwining political and intellectual histories of the Russian Eurasianist movement, Hungarian Jobbik, the American Traditional Workers Party, the French GRECE, Greek Golden Dawn, and others through their published essays, blogs, vlogs and social media. Perhaps most importantly, the course asks: can we use f-word (fascism) to describe this problem? In order to pose this question we will explore the aesthetic concerns of the New Right in relation to postmodern theory, and the affective politics of nationalism. This course thus frames the rise of a global new right interdisciplinary and comparatively as a historical, geopolitical and aesthetic problem.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27003 /37003 Narratives of Assimilation

(NEHC 20223; NEHC 30223; RLST 26623)

This course offers a survey into the manifold strategies of representing the Jewish community in East Central Europe beginning from the nineteenth century to the Holocaust. Engaging the concept of liminality-of a society at the threshold of radical transformation-it will analyze Jewry facing uncertainties and challenges of the modern era and its radical changes. Students will be acquainted with problems of cultural and linguistic isolation, hybrid identity, assimilation, and cultural transmission through a wide array of genres-novel, short story, epic poem, memoir, painting, illustration, film. The course draws on both Jewish and Polish-Jewish sources; all texts are read in English translation.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27029 /37029 Survival

(JWSC 27029)

This course will discuss the complex experience of survival, its forms and conceptualizations. Not limited to a historical discourse, the course's content and scope are framed by modernity, beginning in the 19th century biological notion of survival through its subsequent milestone articulation by Franz Rosenzweig and concluding in the selective reading from a plethora of post-Holocaust writings. What does it mean to survive? According to those who during WWII lived on the narrow threshold between life and death and survived its precariousness, survival depended on diverse rational and irrational factors such as faith (extrinsic or intrinsic), health, age, wealth, egoism, coincidence, hope, and luck that often verge on the miraculous; thus, no discursive centrality would be ascribed to any of the forms of survival under our investigation. During the course we will become familiar with historical, philosophical, and biographical accounts of survival.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(CMLT 23301; ANTH 35908; NEHC 30568; CMLT 33301; ANTH 25908; NEHC 20568)

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments and a living epic tradition.This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political and anthropological, perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition first-hand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29010 /39010 20th Century Russian & South East European Emigre Literature

(CMLT 26912; CMLT 36912)

Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(HIST 34005,NEHC 20573,HIST 24005,NEHC 30573,CMLT 23401,CMLT 33401)

What makes it possible for the imagined communities called nations to command the emotional attachments that they do? This course considers some possible answers to Benedict Anderson's question on the basis of material from the Balkans. We will examine the transformation of the scenario of paradise, loss, and redemption into a template for a national identity narrative through which South East European nations retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma and Kant's notion of the sublime, we will contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29021 /39021 The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov

(FNDL 29020)

“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people…. Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as the subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand Master and Margarita.

2019-2020 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29023 /39023 Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest

(CMLT 29023; CMLT 39023; HIST 23609; HIST 33609; NEHC 29023; NEHC 39023)

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself—self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization—and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveillance

(CMLT 29024,CMLT 39024)

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 29910 /39910 Special Topics in Advanced Russian

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor. Class meets for 2 hours each week. We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 25005 /45005 History Of International Cinema II

(ARTH 28600; ARTH 38600; ARTV 20003; CMLT 22500; CMLT 32500; CMST 48600; ENGL 29600; ENGL 48900; MAAD 18600; MAPH 33700)

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies. CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended.

Staff
2019-2020 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(ANTH 25908, ANTH 35908, CMLT 23301, CMLT 33301, NEHC 20568, NEHC 30568)

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

Readings in English. Background in the Balkans will make the course easier, but is not required.

2018-2019
Category
Literature and Linguistics

CZEC 10103 First-Year Czech I

This course introduces the Czech language to those students who would like to speak Czech or use the language for reading and research purposes. All four major communicative skills (i.e. reading, writing, listening, speaking) are stressed. Students will also learn about Czech culture through readings, films and class activities. This three- quarter sequence prepares students for the second-year Czech course and to study or travel abroad in the Czech Republic. Conversation practice is held weekly.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103 First-Year Polish I

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.  Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 First-Year Russian-1

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This year-long course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10203 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian-II

The major objective of the course is to build a solid foundation in the basic grammatical patterns of written and spoken Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, while simultaneously introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans and is designed for students with a wide range of interests. Screenings of movies and other audio-visual materials are held in addition to scheduled class time. Knowledge of a Slavic language and background in linguistics not required.

BCSN 10103 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 10203 First Year Czech-2

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

CZEC 10103 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 10203 First Year Polish-2

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g., communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students’ native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10203 First-Year Russian-2

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All five major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, comprehension, and speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Russian 10103 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

In this introductory course of a three-course sequence in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian-3

The major objective of the course is to build a solid foundation in the basic grammatical patterns of written and spoken Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, while simultaneously introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans and is designed for students with a wide range of interests. Screenings of movies and other audio-visual materials are held in addition to scheduled class time. Knowledge of a Slavic language and background in linguistics not required.

BCSN 10103 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10303 First Year Polish-3

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Poli 10203 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10303 First-Year Russian-3

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10400 Russian Through Pushkin I

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin's shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10500 Russian Through Puskin-2

This course continues RUSS 10100-10200-10300; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10600 Russian Through Pushkin III

This literary and linguistic approach to Russian allows students to learn the language by engaging classic Russian poetic texts (e.g., Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman), as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin and selections from Pushkin's shorter poems and prose works. Although the focus is on reading Russian, all four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed, preparing students for the College Language Competency Exam and for continued study of Russian in second-year courses. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 10500.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

REES 13803 The Soviet Union

(HIST 13803)

This lecture course surveys the making and unmaking of the Soviet Union as a society, culture, economy, superpower, and empire from 1917 to 1991. The Soviet Union began as an unprecedented radical experiment in remaking society and economy, ethnic and gender relations, personal identities, even human nature. In the course of its history, it came to resemble other (capitalist) societies, sharing, in turn, their violence, welfare provisions, and consumerism. The story of this transformation—from being unique and exhilarating to being much like everyone else, only poorer and more drab—will be at the center of our exploration. The main themes of the course include social and cultural revolutions; ideology and the role of Marxism; political violence from the birth of the socialist state to the end of the Stalin terror; Stalinism, its origins, practices, aesthetics, legacies, and critiques; law, dissent, and human rights; nationality policies and the role of ethnic minorities; the economy of shortages and the material culture it created; institutions of daily life (communal apartments, courtyards, peasant markets, dachas, and boiler rooms); socialist realism and the Soviet dreamworld.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 20103 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I

The first quarter is devoted to an overview of grammar, with emphasis on verbal morphology and syntax, through the reading of a series of literary texts in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

CZEC 20103 Second Year Czech-1

The main goal of this course is to enable students to read Czech proficiently in their particular fields. Conversation practice is included. The program is flexible and may be adjusted according to the needs of the students.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20103 Second-Year Polish I

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.  Drill sessions to be arranged.

Poli 10303 or equivalent.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 Second-Year Russian-1

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20203 Second-Year Russian-2

This course continues RUSS 10100-10200-10300; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20203 Second-Year Polish-2

The primary goal of second year Polish is to expand the student’s speaking, reading and writing skills by building on grammar and vocabulary learned during the first year of study. As a complement to the linguistic side of the course, the student will gain a greater familiarity with Polish history and culture through varied means including readings of literary works, articles from contemporary Polish newspapers and movies.

Fall Quarter of Second Year Polish or instructor consent

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20203 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian II

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS, and therefore assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast archive of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice a week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

BCSN 10303 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 20203 Second-Year Czech-2

The main goal of this course is to enable students to read Czech proficiently in their particular fields. Conversation practice is included. The program is flexible and may be adjusted according to the needs of the students.

CZEC 10303 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian-3

The first quarter is devoted to an overview of grammar, with emphasis on verbal morphology and syntax, through the reading of a series of literary texts in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The second and third quarters are devoted to further developing active mastery of Bosian/Croatian/Serbian through continued readings, grammar drills, compositions, and conversational practice. Study of word formation, nominal and adjectival morphology, and syntax are emphasized. Screenings of movies and other audio-visual materials are held in addition to scheduled class time.

BCSN 20103 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

CZEC 20303 Second-Year Czech-3

CZEC 20203 or consent of instructor

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20303 Second-Year Russian-3

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20303 Second-Year Polish-3

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Poli 20203 or instructor consent.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 Third-Year Russian through Culture I

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20802 Third Year Russ: Culture-2

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20701 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

REES 24418 Ruining Chekhov: Reading and Staging the Modernist Play

"Stanislavski has ruined my play!" Anton Chekhov's notoriously negative response to Konstantin Stanislavski's production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theater provides the point of departure for this course and its examination of both Chekhov's plays and their production history in Russia, the Soviet Union, and abroad. As we investigate the texts, performances, and non-theatrical adaptations of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, we will explore the particular problems of reading and staging Chekhov, whose often sparse stage directions and ambiguous dialogue create the potential for strikingly different interpretations. Through questioning this openness and other defining features of Chekhov's plays, we will study the ways these productions changed and adapted to new countries, new political contexts, and new tendencies in theater and performance throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Over the course of the quarter, we will bring together our discussion of the stage and screen history of these works together with our own ideas about potential approaches to staging or adapting Chekhov's works.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26011 Intro to Russian Civilization-1

(HIST 13900, SOSC 24000)

The first quarter covers the ninth century to the 1870s; the second quarter continues on through the post-Soviet period. Working closely with a variety of primary sources-from oral legends to film and music, from political treatises to literary masterpieces-we will track the evolution of Russian civilization over the centuries and through radically different political regimes. Topics to be discussed include the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western culture in Russian civilization; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual and cultural life; the relationship between center and periphery; systems of social and political legitimization; and symbols and practices of collective identity.

Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26012 Intro to Russian Civilization-2

(HIST 14000, SOSC 24100)

This two-quarter sequence, which meets the general education requirement in civilization studies, provides an interdisciplinary introduction to Russian civilization. The first quarter covers the ninth century to the 1870s; the second quarter continues on through the post-Soviet period. Working closely with a variety of primary sources-from oral legends to film and music, from political treatises to literary masterpieces-we will track the evolution of Russian civilization over the centuries and through radically different political regimes. Topics to be discussed include the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western culture in Russian civilization; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual and cultural life; the relationship between center and periphery; systems of social and political legitimization; and symbols and practices of collective identity. Note: Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required.

Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20001 /30001 War and Peace

Written in the wake of the Crimean War (1856) and the emancipation of the serfs (1861), Tolstoy's War and Peace represents Russia's most important national narrative. Tolstoy chooses to set his tale during the Napoleonic wars, the epoch commonly regarded as the moment of national awakening, which gave rise to major social and political transformations within the Russian society that were still underway at the time when Tolstoy wrote and published his epic. Reading War and Peace we not only learn a lot about Russian history and culture, but  also have a rare chance to visit the writer's workshop and witness the creation of a completely original, organic work of art. It is a telling fact that Tolstoy's novel-epic-a unique hybrid of several different genres deliberately designed as a riposte to the typical West European novel - was never finalized, because after publishing this work in a serial form in a leading "thick journal" Tolstoy continued to return to War and Peace throughout the rest of his life. This course will focus on both the artistic and intellectual facets of War and Peace. This course is recommended for students interested in Russian and European literature, history and political science as well as those who are building a Fundamentals major. The course is open to all undergraduates and some graduate students (by consent). Reading, discussion and papers will be in English.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 21302 /30102 Advanced Russian Thru Media-1

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This sequence emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions (weekly) and office hours (by appointment). Oral Proficiency Interviews are conducted in the beginning and the end of the course (Autumn and Spring Quarters). Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21402 /30202 Adv Russian Through Media-2

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 21302 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21502/30302 Adv Russian Through Media-3

(REES 21502; REES 30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

Russian 21302 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20403/30403 Third Year Polish-1

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter-the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter-the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter-the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20503 /30503 Third-Year Polish 2

The goal of this course is to help students widen their knowledge about contemporary Polish literature, film and politics while expanding their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. We will read Polish literary and historical texts from the 20th and 21st centuries, watch movies, read and discuss the news. Topics of stylistics will be covered as well in the course.

Fall Quarter of Third-Year Polish or instructor consent.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20603 /30603 Third-Year Polish-3

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter-the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter-the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter-the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

Poli 20503 or instructor consent.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20902 /30902 Third-Year Russian through Culture III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

Russian 20701 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 21101/31101 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Fiction

(REES 21100, REES 31103)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. Language through Fiction is designed to help students and instructors over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training-the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited texts. Literature represents the greatest development of the expressive possibilities of a language and reveals the bounds within which language operates. The texts will immerse motivated language students in a complete language experience, as the passages and related exercises present the language's structure on every page. Students will learn how to engage the natural, organic language of a literary text across a variety of styles and themes. The course assumes that students are familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary, as well as both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. It is particularly appealing to students who are interested in the literature, history, and anthropology of the region. Equivalent Course(s): REES 31103,BCSN 31101,REES 21100

BCSN 20300 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 /31203 Advanced BCS: Language through Film

This course is tailored to the needs of the students enrolled, depending on their concentration in the field. It enhances language acquisition with continuous reading and translation of essays, newspaper articles, literary excerpts, letters and other selected writings. Vocabulary building is emphasized by the systematic study of nominal and verbal roots, prefixes and suffixes, and word formation thereafter. Discussion follows each completed reading with a written composition assigned in relation to the topic.

BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Winter

BCSN 21400/31403 Advanced BCS: Language through Art and Architecture

This course is tailored to the needs of the students enrolled, depending on their concentration in the field. It enhances language acquisition with continuous reading and translation of essays, newspaper articles, literary excerpts, letters and other selected writings. Vocabulary building is emphasized by the systematic study of nominal and verbal roots, prefixes and suffixes, and word formation thereafter. Discussion follows each completed reading with a written composition assigned in relation to the topic.

BCSN 21200/31203 or consent of instructor.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Language

REES 23115 /33115 Old Church Slavonic

(LING 23115, LING 35100)

This course is an introduction to the language of the oldest Slavic texts. It begins with a brief historical overview of the relationship of Old Church Slavonic to Common Slavic and the other Slavic languages. This is followed by a short outline of Old Church Slavonic inflectional morphology. The remainder of the course is spent in the reading and grammatical analysis of original texts in Cyrillic or Cyrillic transcription of the original Glagolitic.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 25603 /35603 Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump

Over the past 200 years, various political and cultural regimes of Russia have systematically exploited the gap between experience and representation to create their own mediated worlds--from the tight censorship of the imperial and Soviet periods to the propaganda of the Soviet period and the recent use of media simulacra for strategic geopolitical advantage. During this same period state control of media has been used to seclude Russia from the advancement of liberalism, market economics, individual rights, modernist art, Freud, Existentialism, and, more recently, Western discourses of inclusion, sustainability, and identity. Examining this history, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether the architects of Russian culture have been hopelessly backward or shrewd phenomenologists, keenly aware of the relativity of experience and of their ability to shape it. This course will explore the worlds that these practices produce, with an emphasis on Russia's recent confrontations with Western culture and power, and including various practices of subversion of media control, such as illegal printing and circulation. Texts for the course will draw from print, sound, and visual media, and fields of analysis will include aesthetics, cultural history, and media theory. 

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26065 /36065 The Underground: Alienation, Mobilization, Resistance

The ancient and multivalent image of the underground has crystallized over the last two centuries to denote sites of disaffection from—and strategies of resistance to—dominant social, political and cultural systems. We will trace the development of this metaphor from the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s and the French Resistance during World War II to the Weather Underground in the 1960s-1970s, while also considering it as a literary and artistic concept, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Ellison’s Invisible Man to Chris Marker’s film La Jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Alongside with such literary and cinematic tales, drawing theoretical guidance from refuseniks from Henry David Thoreau to Guy Debord, this course investigates how countercultural spaces become—or fail to become—sites of political resistance, and also how dissenting ideologies give rise to countercultural spaces. We ask about the relation between social deviance (the failure to meet social norms, whether willingly or unwittingly) and political resistance, especially in the conditions of late capitalism and neo-colonialism, when countercultural literature, film and music (rock, punk, hip-hop, DIY aesthetics etc.) get absorbed into—and coopted by—the hegemonic socio-economic system. In closing we will also consider contemporary forms of dissidence—from Pussy Riot to Black Lives Matter—that rely both on the vulnerability of individual bodies and global communication networks.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26071 /36071 Film and Revolution

(CMST 24521; CMST 34521)

On the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 our course couples the study of revolutionary films (and films about revolution) with seminal readings on revolutionary ideology and on the theory of film and video. The goal will be to articulate the mechanics of revolution and its representation in time-based media. Students will produce a video or videos adapting the rich archive of revolutionary film for today's situation. The films screened will be drawn primarily from Soviet and US cinema, from the 1920s to the present day, proceeding more or less chronologically. We begin with newsreels and a "poetic documentary" by Dziga Vertov; they will be paired with classic readings from revolutionary theory, from Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to Fidel Castro and Bill Ayres, and from film theory, including Vertov, Andre Bazin and Jean-Luc Godard. Readings will acquaint students with contemporary assessments of the emancipatory potential of film.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26077 /36077 Russian Modernist Theater

Russian Modernist Theater explores the theory and practice of the new stage forms developed in Russia from 1900 to 1940. The course begins with the Stanislavsky school, and then delves deeply into the more experimental work of Meyerhold and his generation and the first attempts to create a revolutionary Soviet theater in the 1920s. The course will include a production, which will be scaled to the number and ambitions of the enrolled students. Course requirements can be met through the writing of a conventional paper, or through the production, via set or costume design, dramaturgy, performance, or staging. Each of these production assignments will require a write-up relating the work to the course materials and discussions.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27027 /37027 Cinema and the Holocaust

(CMST 22507, CMST 32507, JWSC 29550)

The course focuses on the cinematic responses by several leading film directors from East and Central Europe to one of the central events of 20th century history -- the event known as the Holocaust.  The Nazis began a cinematic documentation of WWII at its onset, positioning their cameras in places of actual atrocities. Their goal was to produce documentary footage framed by hostile propagandistic schemes; contrary to this ‘method’, the Holocaust feature films are all but a representation of the Jewish genocide produced after the actual, traumatic events of that war took place. In this class we aim at discussing the challenge of representing the Jewish genocide which has often been defined as un-representable. Because of this challenge, the Holocaust films raise questions of ethical responsibility for the cinematic production and a search for relevant artistic means with which to engage the post-traumatic representation. Therefore, among the major tropes we will analyze the voyeuristic evocation of death and suffering; a truthful representation of violence versus the purported necessity of its cinematic aesthetization; as well as the intertwined notions of chance and hope as conditions of survival versus the hagiographic representation of victims.  While our main goal is to grasp the potential of cinema for deepening our understanding of the Holocaust, the course simultaneously explores the extensive and continuous cinematic production of the genre and its historical development in various European countries, to mention the impact of censorship by official ideologies in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

Film screenings, class participation, reading assignments, one class presentation, and a final project.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(HIST 34005, NEHC 20573,HIST 24005,NEHC 30573,CMLT 23401,CMLT 33401)

What makes it possible for the imagined communities called nations to command the emotional attachments that they do? This course considers some possible answers to Benedict Anderson's question on the basis of material from the Balkans. We will examine the transformation of the scenario of paradise, loss, and redemption into a template for a national identity narrative through which South East European nations retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma and Kant's notion of the sublime, we will contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity.

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(CMLT 23401,CMLT 33401,NEHC 20573,NEHC 30573,HIST 24005,HIST 34005)

The Other Within the Self: Identity in Balkan Literature and Film. This two-course sequence examines discursive practices in a number of literary and cinematic works from the South East corner of Europe through which identities in the region become defined by two distinct others: the “barbaric, demonic” Ottoman and the “civilized” Western European.

This course begins by defining the nation both historically and conceptually, with attention to Romantic nationalism and its flourishing in Southeastern Europe. We then look at the narrative of original wholeness, loss, and redemption through which Balkan countries retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Freud's analysis of masochistic desire and Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity. The figure of the Janissary highlights the significance of the other in the definition of the self. Some possible texts are Petar Njegoš's Mountain Wreath; Ismail Kadare's The Castle; and Anton Donchev's Time of Parting.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29018 /39018 Imaginary Worlds:Fantastic & Magic Realism in Russia& SE Europe

(CMLT 27701, CMLT 37701, RUSS 27300, RUSS 37300)

In this course, we will ask what constitutes the fantastic and magic realism as literary genres while reading some of the most interesting writings to have come out of Russia and Southeastern Europe. While considering the stylistic and narrative specificities of this narrative mode, we also think about its political functions —from subversive to escapist, to supportive of a nationalist imaginary—in different contexts and at different historic moments in the two regions.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29021 /39021 The Shadows of Living Things: the Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov

“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people…. Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil.
 
Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death.  The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand Master and Margarita.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveillance

(CMLT 29024,CMLT 39024)

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

2018-2019 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 25005 /45005 History of International Cinema, Part II: Sound Era to 1960

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

2018-2019 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 49701 Colloquium: Cultural Cold War

In this course we will consider culture wars amidst the Cold War. We will range across media and aesthetic schools to examine the entanglement of art and politics, culture and diplomacy, creativity and propaganda, consumerism and the avant-garde, nuclear aspirations and dystopian visions, artistic freedom and police operations. The course's basic premise is that, notwithstanding the bipolar world it created, the Cold War was a multisided affair, so our readings will extend beyond the United States and the Soviet Union to include various national contexts.

2018-2019 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 Second Year Russian I, II, III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension.  Systematic study of word formation and other strategics are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating.  Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background.  Conversation practices is held twice a week.

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018
Category
Language

RUSS 10103, 10203 , 10303 First Year Russian I, II, III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research.  All five major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, comprehension, and speaking) are stressed.  Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions.  This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries.  Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture.  It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g., communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 10103, 10203, 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice.  The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical  pattens of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.  This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like.  The course includes a socialinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages.  Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture.  It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g., communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 First Year Russian I, II, III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research.  All five major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, comprehension, and speaking) are stressed.  Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions.  This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries.  Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 10103, 10203, 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice.  The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical  pattens of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.  This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like.  The course includes a socialinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages.  Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 First Year Russian I, II, III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research.  All five major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, comprehension, and speaking) are stressed.  Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions.  This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries.  Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 10103, 10203, 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice.  The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical  pattens of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.  This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like.  The course includes a socialinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages.  Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture.  It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g., communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second Year Russian I, II, III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension.  Systematic study of word formation and other strategics are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating.  Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background.  Conversation practices is held twice a week.

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies.  Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles.  In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions.  Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 Second Year Russian I, II, III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension.  Systematic study of word formation and other strategics are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating.  Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background.  Conversation practices is held twice a week.

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies.  Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles.  In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions.  Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

REES 20103, 20203, 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies.  Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles.  In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions.  Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third Year Russian Culture I, II, III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions ot be arranged.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 Third Year Russian Culture I, II, III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 Third Year Russian Culture I, II, III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions ot be arranged.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

REES 22402 Fate and Duty: European Tragedy from Aeschylus to Brecht

(CMLT 22402)

This class will explore the development of European drama from Attic tragedy and comedy and their reception in Ancient Rome and French Neoclassicism to the transformation of dramatic form in 18-20th c. European literatures. The focus will be on the evolution of plot, characterization, time-and-space of dramatic action, ethical notions (free will, guilt, conscience), as well as on representations of affect. All readings in English. No prerequisites.

Boris Maslov
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 24410 Animation in the Eastern Bloc

In this course we will explore thematic, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of animated film in socialist Central and Eastern Europe from the 1920s through the late 1980s. Rather than attempting an exhaustive survey of the region’s animated films and their contexts, we will bring a sampling of films from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Bulgaria together with readings from the growing body of theoretical and critical works on animated film in hopes of building an understanding of animated film as a medium and of what does (or does not) make the animated films of socialist Central and Eastern Europe unique.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES Lolita Lolita

(FNDL 25300, ENGL 28916)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20011 /30011 Gogol

One of the most enigmatic authors in Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was hailed in his own lifetime as the leading prose writer of his generation, a brilliant comic writer, and the innovator of the new school of Russian Naturalism/Realism. Since his death, Gogol has been the subject of ever-greater critical controversy. Reading representative works from each period of Gogol's career, including his Petersburg Tales and Dead Souls, we will trace the author's creative development and consider it in relation to his biography and early 19th-century Russian literary and social history. We will work together to identify the characteristic features of Gogol's narrative technique as well as the challenges to interpretation his texts pose. No knowledge of Russian required.

Esther Peters
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502/30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

(REES 21502/30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 21302, 21402, 21502/30102, 30202, 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

(REES 21502, REES 30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21302, 21402, 21502/30102, 30202, 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

(REES 21502/30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20403, 20503, 20603/30403, 30503, 30603 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succintly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter-the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter-the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter-the new independent Poland.  During the course of the year, students also improve their knowlege of advanced grammar and stylistics.  All work in Polish.

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20403, 20503, 20603/30403, 30503, 30603 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succintly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter-the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter-the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter-the new independent Poland.  During the course of the year, students also improve their knowlege of advanced grammar and stylistics.  All work in Polish.

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20403, 20503, 20603/30403, 30503, 30603 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succintly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter-the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter-the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter-the new independent Poland.  During the course of the year, students also improve their knowlege of advanced grammar and stylistics.  All work in Polish.

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

REES 21006 /31006 Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: (In)action, Surveillance, Terrorism

(FNDL 21006)

This course centers on a close reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907). Contemporary critics often consider this novel to be the archetypal fictional work about terrorism, as it is based on the bomb attack that occurred on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1888. The Secret Agent demonstrates, however, much more than its prophetic significance rediscovered after 9/11. Therefore, the course seeks how the novel’s relevance stems in equal measure from Conrad’s interest in a wider political process and his distrust of state power; in particular, the course explores how these forces determine the individual caught in a confining situation. We read The Secret Agent as a political novel, which in its struggle for solutions defies chaos as well as an imposition of a single ideology or one authorial point of view. The novel’s ambiguities and political antinomies reveal its polyphonic structure allowing for interdisciplinary readings (Marxist, contextual, proto-existentialist, post-Lacanian) that also present an opportunity to critically overview the established approaches to main Conradian themes; for example, in order to destabilize the standard view of the writer as a conservative anti-revolutionary of Polish ilk, we consider the biographical connection, such as his family members’ radical (“Red”) social agenda of the abolishment of serfdom. In analyzing the formation of the narrative’s ideology we analyze Conrad’s historical pessimism that demonstrates with sustained irony how capitalism breeds social injustice that, in turn, breeds anarchism. The class also focuses on just how the novel exposes duplicity in staging surveillance, terrorism, as well as adjacent forms of violence or sacrifice. The critical texts include several but influential readings of the novel’s political and social dimension, as well as the most recent pronouncements of its complexity. All texts are in English.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 21101 /31101 Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction

(REES 21101/31101)

Advanced BCS course encompasses both 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content.  The courses are not in sequence.  Language through Fiction is designed to help students and instructors over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training-the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited texts.  Literature represents the greatest development of the expressive possibilities of a language and reveals the bounds within which language operates.  The texts will immerse motivated language students in a complete language experience, as the passages and related exercises present the language's structure on every page.  Students will learn how to engage the natural, organic language of a literary text across a variety of styles and themes.  The course assumes that students are familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary, as well as both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.  It is particularly appealing to students who are interested in the literature, history, and anthropology of the region.

First and Second Year BCS or equivalent.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 /31200 Advanced BCS: Language through Film

(REES 21200/31200)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. This course addresses the theme of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav identity through discussion and interpretation based on selected films, documentaries, images, and related texts—historical and literary, popular press, advertisements, screenplays, and literature on film. Emphasis is on interpersonal communication as well as the interpretation and production of language in written and oral forms. The course engages in systematic grammar review, along with introduction of some new linguistic topics, with constant practice in writing and vocabulary enrichment. The syllabus includes the screening of six films, each from a different director, region, and period, starting with Cinema Komunisto (2012), a documentary by Mila Turajlic. This film will be crucial for understanding how Yugoslav cinema was born and how, in its origins, it belongs to what a later cinephile, Fredric Jameson, has called a “geopolitical aesthetic.” We shall investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema, and pay close attention to aesthetic conceptions and concrete formal properties, and more importantly, to language, narrative logic, and style.

First and Second Year BCS or equivalent.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 21300 /31300 (Re)Branding the Balkan City: Contemporary Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, also Advanced BCS

(REES 21300/31300)

The course will use an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, infrastructure, and transformations of these three cities, now the capitals of Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we will consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, urban life as praxis, art and design movements, architectural histories and styles, metropolitan citizenship, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. Classes are held in English. No knowledge of BCS is required. However, this module can fulfill a language requirement or simply further the study of BCS with additional weekly sections, materials, discussions, and presentations in the target language.

First and Second Year BCS or equivalent.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

REES 23137 /33137 Narratives of Suspense in European/Russian Lit/Film

(CMLT 22100,CMST 25102,CMST 35102,ENGL 26901,ENGL 46901)

This course examines the nature and creation of suspense in literature and film as an introduction to narrative theory. We will question how and why stories are created, as well as what motivates us to continue reading, watching, and listening to stories. We will explore how particular genres (such as detective stories and thrillers) and the mediums of literature and film influence our understanding of suspense and narrative more broadly. Close readings of primary sources will be supplemented with critical and theoretical readings. Literary readings will include work by John Buchan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Feodor Dostoevsky, Graham Green, Bohumil Hrabal, and J.M. Coetzee. We will also explore Alfred Hitchcock's take on 39 Steps and the Czech New Wave manifesto film, Pearls of the Deep. With theoretical readings by: Roland Barthes, Viktor Shklovsky, Erich Auerbach, Paul Ricoeur, and others.

Esther Peters
2017-2018 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 25603 /35603 Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump

(SIGN 26029)

Over the past 200 years, various political and cultural regimes of Russia have systematically exploited the gap between experience and representation to create their own mediated worlds--from the tight censorship of the imperial and Soviet periods to the propaganda of the Soviet period and the recent use of media simulacra for strategic geopolitical advantage. During this same period state control of media has been used to seclude Russia from the advancement of liberalism, market economics, individual rights, modernist art, Freud, Existentialism, and, more recently, Western discourses of inclusion, sustainability, and identity. Examining this history, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether the architects of Russian culture have been hopelessly backward or shrewd phenomenologists, keenly aware of the relativity of experience and of their ability to shape it. This course will explore the worlds that these practices produce, with an emphasis on Russia's recent confrontations with Western culture and power, and including various practices of subversion of media control, such as illegal printing and circulation. Texts for the course will draw from print, sound, and visual media, and fields of analysis will include aesthetics, cultural history, and media theory. 

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26027 /36027 Jewish Writers in the Russian Tradition

(JWSC 20234)

Considers the experience of Jewish national subjectivity under conditions of Russian and Soviet empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While attentive to practices of physical marginalization and assimilation (the Pale of Settlement, Birobidzhan), we will focus mainly on the literary record in works by Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Kovner, Babel, An-sky, Bagritsky, Grossman, Ehrenburg, and Brodsky. The syllabus also includes works in theatre, painting and film, as well as important critical texts on subjectivity and post-colonial theory.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 36067 The Aesthetics of Socialist Realism

(CMST 44510, ARTH 44502)

Although Socialist Realism has been dismissed as propaganda or kitsch, this interdisciplinary seminar will take it seriously as the aesthetic project of socialism, with its particularly sensory or haptic address to its audiences. Reflecting on Socialist Realism on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, our premise is that it challenged the assumptions of Western art, including the concept of the avant-garde and the art market itself, offering an alternate model of revolutionary cultural practice and a potentially liberatory politics of gender and race. The seminar will focus on Soviet visual art, cinema and writing during the 1930s under Stalin, and will be co-taught with Prof. Christina Kiaer of Art History at Northwestern University. The seminar will have a special emphasis on female makers and the representation of women’s experience, because it will draw on the Fall 2017 exhibition Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum of Art (http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/revolution-every-day/), which is co-curated by the professors; it will also take advantage of the Art Institute’s major fall exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, to which Prof. Kiaer contributed, as well as the film programming related to these shows. The seminar will include students from both universities, meeting alternate weeks at the Northwestern and U of C campuses (assistance with organizing transportation will be provided). We welcome students with research interests that extend beyond Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

Course meetings will be divided evenly between the campuses of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Robert Bird, Christina Kiaer
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26068 /36068 The Underground: Alienation, Mobilization, Resistance

(SIGN 26012; CMST 24568/CMST 34568)

The ancient and multivalent image of the underground has crystallized over the last two centuries to denote sites of disaffection from—and strategies of resistance to—dominant social, political and cultural systems. We will trace the development of this metaphor from the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s and the French Resistance during World War II to the Weather Underground in the 1960s-1970s, while also considering it as a literary and artistic concept, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Ellison’s Invisible Man to Chris Marker’s film La Jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Alongside with such literary and cinematic tales, drawing theoretical guidance from refuseniks from Henry David Thoreau to Guy Debord, this course investigates how countercultural spaces become—or fail to become—sites of political resistance, and also how dissenting ideologies give rise to countercultural spaces. We ask about the relation between social deviance (the failure to meet social norms, whether willingly or unwittingly) and political resistance, especially in the conditions of late capitalism and neo-colonialism, when countercultural literature, film and music (rock, punk, hip-hop, DIY aesthetics etc.) get absorbed into—and coopted by—the hegemonic socio-economic system. In closing we will also consider contemporary forms of dissidence—from Pussy Riot to Black Lives Matter—that rely both on the vulnerability of individual bodies and global communication networks.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26064 /36070 Revolution

(HIST 23707, HIST 33707)

Revolution primarily denotes radical political change, but this definition is both too narrow and too broad. Too broad, because since the late eighteenth century revolution has been associated specifically with an emancipatory politics, from American democracy to Soviet communism. Too narrow, because revolutionary political change is always accompanied by change in other spheres, from philosophy to everyday life. We investigate the history of revolution from 1776 to the present, with a particular focus on the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, in order to ascertain how social revolutions have been constituted, conducted and enshrined in political and cultural institutions. We also ask what the conditions and prospects of revolution are today. Readings will be drawn from a variety of fields, from philosophy to social history. Most readings will be primary documents, from Rousseau and Marx to Bill Ayers, but will also include major statements in the historiography of revolution.

Robert Bird, Sheila Fitzpatrick
2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26075 /36075 Science Fiction in Eastern Europe and Russia

In this course we will examine the cultural, historical, and political contexts of some of the great works of science fiction from Eastern Europe and Russia through literature like (but not limited to) Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (origin of the robot), Evgenii Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We (the inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984), and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (the inspiration for several film versions including Andrei Tarkovsky’s in 1972). Our primary objective will be to examine how these writers used science fiction to interpret, comment upon, or critique their historical moment. How did these works propose alternate realities? Or how did they engage with the new and changing realities of the 20th century? All readings in English.

Esther Peters
2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27003 /37003 Narratives of Assimilation

( ISHU 29405,FNDL 26903)

This course offers a survey into the manifold strategies of representing the Jewish community in East Central Europe beginning from the nineteenth century to the Holocaust. Engaging the concept of liminality—of a society at the threshold of radical transformation—it will analyze Jewry facing uncertainties and challenges of the modern era and its radical changes. Students will be acquainted with problems of cultural and linguistic isolation, hybrid identity, assimilation, and cultural transmission through a wide array of genres—novel, short story, epic poem, memoir, painting, illustration, film. The course draws on both Jewish and Polish-Jewish sources; all texts are read in English translation.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27019 /37019 The Holocaust Object

(JWSC 29500, ANTH 23910, ANTH 35035, HIST 23413, HIST 33413)

In this course we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented during WWII. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos, extermination and concentration camps. These sites which – once the locations of genocide – are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants, also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preservation, which we view through a prism of authenticity. In order to study representation, we critically engage a textual and visual reading of museum narrations and fiction writings; to tackle with demands of preservation we apply a neo-materialist approach. Of special interest are survivors’ testimonies as appended to the artifacts they donated. The course will also equip you with salient critical tools for future creative research in the Holocaust studies.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27026 /37026 Kieslowski: The Decalogue

(FNDL 24003)

During this course, we study the monumental series of “The Decalogue,” produced by one of the most influential filmmakers from Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Instead of mechanically relating the ten shorter films to the Ten Commandments, we critically explore the relevance of the biblical moral rules to the state of modern man. Each part of the series contests the absolutism of these moral axioms through ethical dilemmas of extreme situations as they occur in the Polish communist space where libidinal and material drives co-exist with familial antagonism and social impassivity. We focus on peculiarities of Kieślowski’s cinematic storytelling, while analyzing deontological ethics’ dis-alignment with modernist spirituality and with its subjective turn. An analysis of the films is accompanied by Kieślowski and Piesiewicz’s screen scripts, as well as by readings from Kieślowski’s own writings and interviews; some criticism by Zizek, Kickasola, Haltof is included. All materials are in English.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(ANTH 25908, ANTH 35908, CMLT 23301, CMLT 33301, NEHC 20568, NEHC 30568)

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(CMLT 23401,CMLT 33401,NEHC 20573,NEHC 30573,HIST 24005,HIST 34005)

The Other Within the Self: Identity in Balkan Literature and Film. This two-course sequence examines discursive practices in a number of literary and cinematic works from the South East corner of Europe through which identities in the region become defined by two distinct others: the “barbaric, demonic” Ottoman and the “civilized” Western European. This course begins by defining the nation both historically and conceptually, with attention to Romantic nationalism and its flourishing in Southeastern Europe. We then look at the narrative of original wholeness, loss, and redemption through which Balkan countries retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Freud's analysis of masochistic desire and Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity. The figure of the Janissary highlights the significance of the other in the definition of the self. Some possible texts are Petar Njegoš's Mountain Wreath; Ismail Kadare's The Castle; and Anton Donchev's Time of Parting.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29018 /39018 Imaginary Worlds:Fantastic & Magic Realism in Russia & Southeastern Europe

(CMLT 27701, CMLT 37701)

In this course, we will ask what constitutes the fantastic and magic realism as literary genres while reading some of the most interesting writings to have come out of Russia and Southeastern Europe. While considering the stylistic and narrative specificities of this narrative mode, we also think about its political functions —from subversive to escapist, to supportive of a nationalist imaginary—in different contexts and at different historic moments in the two regions.

Readings in English. Background in Russia and the Balkans will make the course easier, but is not required.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29021 /39021 The Shadows of Living Things: the Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov

(FNDL 29020)

“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people…. Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand Master and Margarita.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29023 /39023 Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest

( CMLT 29023, CMLT 39023, NEHC 29023, NEHC 39023)

This course provides insight into the existential predicament of internalized otherness. We investigate identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We will first examine the historical and theoretical context. In the European peripheries, the emergence into political sovereignty and national culture, and the formation of a national self as modern political subject, are predicated on the importation of the economic center’s civilizational models. The very inception of modern peripheral national identity is marked by an acute sense of having already fallen behind. In this way, the periphery internalizes its own otherness.

We will then focus on self-representational strategies of the “Rest” (in our case Southeastern Europe and Russia), and the inherent internalization of the imagined western gaze whom the collective peripheral selves aim to seduce but also defy. Two discourse on identity will help us understand these self-representations: the Lacanian concepts of symbolic and imaginary identification, and various readings of the Hegelian recognition by the other in the East European context. Identifying symbolically with a site of normative humanity outside oneself places the self in a precarious position. The responses are varied but acutely felt: from self-consciousness to defiance and arrogance, to self-exoticization and self-mythicization, to self-abjection, all of which can be viewed as forms of a quest for dignity. We will also consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in European and other peripheries. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveillance

(CMLT 29024, CMLT 39024)

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance – the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 29910 - 29911 - 29912/39910 - 39911 - 39912 Special Topics in Advanced Russian I, II, III

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor. Class meets for 2 hours each week.  We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

RUSS 21302/30102, 21402/30202, 21502/30302 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 29910, 29911, 29912/39910, 39911, 39912 Special Topics in Advanced Russian I, II, III

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor. Class meets for 2 hours each week.  We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

RUSS 21302/30102, 21402/30202, 21502/30302 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 29910, 29911, 29912 /39910, 39911, 39912 Special Topics in Advanced Russian I, II, III

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor. Class meets for 2 hours each week.  We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

RUSS 21302/30102, 21402/30202, 21502/30302 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2017-2018 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third Year Russian Culture I, II, III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions ot be arranged.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First Year Russian I, II, III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

CZEC 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Czech I, II, III

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

Esther Peters
2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First Year Russian I, II, III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Czech I, II, III

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

Esther Peters
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

In this three-quarter sequence introductory course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures, students are encouraged to concentrate on the language of their interest and choice. The major objective is to build a solid foundation in the grammatical patterns of written and spoken BCS, while introducing both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is achieved through a communicative situation-based approach, textbook dialogues, reinforcement by the instructor, screenings of film shorts, TV announcements, documentaries, commercials, and the like. The course includes a sociolinguistic component, an essential part of understanding the similarities and differences between the languages. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

CZEC 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Czech I, II, III

This course is an introduction to the basic grammar of Czech with attention given to all four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as exposure to Czech culture. Winter and Spring Quarters include work with Czech film and literature. Students gain some familiarity with the major differences between literary and spoken Czech as they learn to use the language both as a means of communication and as a tool for reading and research.

Esther Peters
2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First Year Russian I, II, III

This course introduces modern Russian to students who would like to speak Russian or to use the language for reading and research. All four major communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) are stressed. Students are also introduced to Russian culture through readings, videos, and class discussions. This yearlong course prepares students for the College Language Competency Exam, for continued study of Russian in second-year courses, and for study or travel abroad in Russian-speaking countries. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g.,communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students' native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second Year Russian I, II, III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second Year Russian I, II, III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second Year Russian I, II, III

This course continues RUSS 10103-10203-10303; it includes review and amplification of grammar, practice in reading, elementary composition, and speaking and comprehension. Systematic study of word formation and other strategies are taught to help free students from excessive dependence on the dictionary and develop confidence in reading rather than translating. Readings are selected to help provide historical and cultural background. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 10103, 10203, 10303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS, and therefore assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast archive of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice a week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

BCSN 10103/10203/10303

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

 

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS, and therefore assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast archive of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice a week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

BCSN 10103/10203/10303

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS, and therefore assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast archive of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice a week, offering students ample opportunity to review and practice materials presented in class.

BCSN 10103/10203/10303

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student's level of preparation.

POLI 10103, 10203, 10303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third Year Russian Culture I, II, III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions ot be arranged.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third Year Russian Culture I, II, III

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20103, 20203, 20303 or consent of instructor. Drill sessions ot be arranged.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

REES 24414 Soviet Science Fiction

In the Soviet Union, science fiction played an integral part in intellectual debates about the best way to engage with the new realities of the twentieth century. This literary and cinematic genre was thought capable of reinventing the lives, realties and even beliefs of the Soviets. This course will study the cultural, historical, and political contexts of science fiction from the Soviet Union through literature such as Evgenii Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We (the inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984), Ivan Efremov’s The Andromeda Nebula (1956), and the work Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, along with films such as Iakov Protazanov's Aelita (1924), the first Soviet science fiction film,  later Pavel Klushantsev’s imaginings of space travel in Road to the Stars (1957), and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972)—a mysterious, human drama set in space. The primary goal of the course is to study how Soviet writers and filmmakers utilizes science fiction to interpret and/or comment upon their present historical moment? What alternatives to Soviet reality were proposed through science fiction? Lastly, how did science fiction texts and films relate to scientific research in the Soviet Union, especially the Soviet space program?

Zdenko Mandusic
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 25602 Russian Short Fiction: Experiments in Form

Russian literature is known for the sweeping epics that Henry James once dubbed the “loose baggy monsters.” However, in addition to the famed ‘doorstop novels,’ the Russian literary canon also has a long tradition of innovative short fiction—of short stories and novellas that experiment with forms of storytelling and narration. This course focuses on such works, as well as the narrative strategies and formal devices that allow these short stories and novellas to be both effective and economical. Throughout the quarter, we will read short fiction from a variety of Russian authors and examine the texts that establish the tradition of Russian short fiction as well as those that push its boundaries. This course will serve as a general survey of Russian Literature, as well as a focused introduction to a particular genre in that tradition. Although predominantly discussion-based, the class will also include short lectures by the instructor to introduce students to the broader historical contexts of the course texts, and to sample diverse theoretical approaches to those texts.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20001 /30001 War and Peace

(CMLT 22301,CMLT 32301,FNDL 27103,ENGL 28912,HIST 23704,ENGL 32302)

Tolstoy’s novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world’s great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20013 /30013 Dostoevsky

(HUMA 24800, RLST 28204, FNDL 24612)

Dostoevsky was an inveterate risk-taker, not only at the baccarat tables of the Grand Casino in Baden-Baden, but in his personal life, his political activities, and his artistic endeavors. This course is intended to investigate his two greatest wagers: on the presence of the divine in the world and on the power of artistic form to convey and articulate this presence. Dostoevsky’s wager on form is evident even in his early, relatively conventional texts, like The Double. It intensifies after his decade-long sojourn in Siberia, exploding in works like The Notes from Underground, which one-and-a-half centuries later remains and aesthetic and philosophical provocation of immense power. The majority of the course will focus on Dostoevsky’s later novels. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky adapts suspense strategies to create a metaphysical thriller, while in The Demons he pairs a study of nihilism with the deformation of the novel as a genre. Through close readings of these works we will trace how Dostoevsky’s formal experimentation created new ways of exploring realms of existence that traditionally belonged philosophy and theology. The results were never comfortable or comforting; we will focus on interpreting Dostoevsky’s metaphysical provocations.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 20020 /30020 Pale Fire

(FNDL 25311)

This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502/30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

(REES 21502/30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502/30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

(EES 21502/30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502/30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502 /30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

(REES 21502/30302)

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20702, 20802, 20902 or consent of instructor; drill sessions to be arranged.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20403 - 20503 - 20603/30403 - 30503 - 30603 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter—the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter—the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter—the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20403 - 20503 - 20603/30403 - 30503 - 30603 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter—the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter—the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter—the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20403 - 20503 - 20603/30403 - 30503 - 30603 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter—the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter—the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter—the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

 

POLI 20103, 20203, 20303 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 21000 /31000 Gombrowicz: The Writer as Philosopher

(ISHU 29405, FNDL 26903)

In this course, we will dwell on Witold Gombrowicz the philosopher, exploring the components of his authorial style that substantiate his claim to both the literary and the philosophical spheres. This erudite Polish author is a prime 20th century modernist whose novels, entangled in an ongoing battle with fundamental questions and, indeed, with existence itself, explode with uncanny laughter. In contrast to many of his contemporary writers who established their reputation by applying existing philosophical models, Gombrowicz employed ironically his philosophical erudition, while engaging in his philosophical récit the literary and cultural tropes which derived from his Polish cultural heritage.  Over the next ten weeks, we will investigate how he twisted these references and tropes to inform a distinctly Gombrowiczian version of performative philosophy. We will read Gombrowicz’s novels, lectures on philosophy and some of his autobiographical writings to seek answers to our overarching question: what makes this author a philosopher?

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 21002 /31002 Kieślowski’s French Cinema

(CMST 24405/34405)

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, WhiteRed turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema.  We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one’s identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker’s dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker’s contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski’s and Piesiewicz’s screen scripts, Kieślowski’s own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 21006 /31006 Joseph Conrad’s: The Secret Agent

(ENGL 21006/31006, FNDL 21006)

This course centers on a close reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907). Contemporary critics often consider this novel to be the archetypal fictional work about terrorism, as it is based on the bomb attack that occurred on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1888. The Secret Agent demonstrates, however, much more than its prophetic significance rediscovered after 9/11. Therefore, the course seeks how the novel’s relevance stems in equal measure from Conrad’s interest in a wider political process and his distrust of state power; in particular, the course explores how these forces determine the individual caught in a confining situation. We read The Secret Agent as a political novel, which in its struggle for solutions defies chaos as well as an imposition of a single ideology or one authorial point of view. The novel’s ambiguities and political antinomies reveal its polyphonic structure allowing for interdisciplinary readings (Marxist, contextual, proto-existentialist, post-Lacanian) that also present an opportunity to critically overview the established approaches to main Conradian themes; for example, in order to destabilize the standard view of the writer as a conservative anti-revolutionary, we consider some biographical connections, such as his family members’ radical (“Red”) social agenda of the abolishment of serfdom. In analyzing the formation of the narrative’s ideology we discuss Conrad’s historical pessimism that demonstrates with sustained irony how capitalism breeds social injustice that, in turn, breeds anarchism. The class also focuses on just how the novel exposes duplicity in staging surveillance, terrorism, as well as adjacent forms of violence or sacrifice. The critical texts include several older but still influential readings (Jameson, Eagleton) of the novel’s political and social dimension, as well as the most recent pronouncements of A Simple Tale’s complexity. All texts are in English.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

BCSN 21101/31101 Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction

(REES 21101/31101)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. Language through Fiction is designed to help students and instructors over one of the most difficult hurdles in language training—the transition from working through lessons in a textbook to reading unedited texts. Literature represents the greatest development of the expressive possibilities of a language and reveals the bounds within which language operates. The texts will immerse motivated language students in a complete language experience, as the passages and related exercises present the language’s structure on every page. Students will learn how to engage the natural, organic language of a literary text across a variety of styles and themes. The course assumes that students are familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary, as well as both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. It is particularly appealing to students who are interested in the literature, history, and anthropology of the region.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 /31200 Advanced BCS: Language through Film

(REES 21200/31200)

Advanced BCS courses encompass both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, with the focus changed from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. The courses are not in sequence. This course addresses the theme of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav identity through discussion and interpretation based on selected films, documentaries, images, and related texts—historical and literary, popular press, advertisements, screenplays, and literature on film. Emphasis is on interpersonal communication as well as the interpretation and production of language in written and oral forms. The course engages in systematic grammar review, along with introduction of some new linguistic topics, with constant practice in writing and vocabulary enrichment. The syllabus includes the screening of six films, each from a different director, region, and period, starting with Cinema Komunisto (2012), a documentary by Mila Turajlic. This film will be crucial for understanding how Yugoslav cinema was born and how, in its origins, it belongs to what a later cinephile, Fredric Jameson, has called a “geopolitical aesthetic.” We shall investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema, and pay close attention to aesthetic conceptions and concrete formal properties, and more importantly, to language, narrative logic, and style.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 21300 /31300 (Re)Branding the Balkan City: Contemporary Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, also Advanced BCS

(REES 21300/31300)

The course will use an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, infrastructure, and transformations of these three cities, now the capitals of Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we will consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, urban life as praxis, art and design movements, architectural histories and styles, metropolitan citizenship, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. Classes are held in English. No knowledge of BCS is required. However, this module can fulfill a language requirement or simply further the study of BCS with additional weekly sections, materials, discussions, and presentations in the target language.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

REES 23203 /32303 Animal Stories

(CMLT 23203)

This course will explore the depiction of animals and the broader concept of animaility in Central and East European Literature. We begin with an introduction to the history of literary depictions of animals in Aesop’s Fables, Herder’s “On Image, Poetry, and Fable,” and Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer -- The Story of a Horse.” Franz Kafka‘s stories--such as “The Metamorphosis” and  “Report to an Academy”--will provide an introduction to the main issues of animality: animal conflict and violence, as in Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts; animal hybridity or transformation, as in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog; animal engagement speech in writing, as in Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.”  Other authors include Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bruno Schulz and Georgi Gospodinov. In addition to exploring the depictions of animals through close readings of the literary texts, the course will also engage with  major philosophical thinkers whose work touches upon animilaty, including: Jacob von Uexküll, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Jaques Derrida.

Esther Peters
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 23137/33137 Narratives of Suspense in European/Russian Lit/Film

(CMLT 22100,CMST 25102,CMST 35102,ENGL 26901,ENGL 46901)

This course examines the nature and creation of suspense in literature and film as an introduction to narrative theory.  We will question how and why stories are created, as well as what motivates us to continue reading, watching, and listening to stories.  We will explore how particular genres (such as detective stories and thrillers) and the mediums of literature and film influence our understanding of suspense and narrative more broadly.  Close readings of primary sources will be supplemented with critical and theoretical readings.  Literary readings will include work by John Buchan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Feodor Dostoevsky, Graham Green, Bohumil Hrabal, and J.M. Coetzee.  We will also explore Alfred Hitchcock's take on 39 Steps and the Czech New Wave manifesto film, Pearls of the Deep.  With theoretical readings by: Roland Barthes, Viktor Shklovsky, Erich Auerbach,  Paul Ricoeur, and others.

Esther Peters
2016-2017 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27021 /37021 Narratives of Assimilation

(JWSC 20003, NEHC 20405/30405)

Engaging the concept of liminality—of a community at the threshold of radical transformation—the course analyzes how East Central European Jewry, facing economic uncertainties and dangers of modern anti-Semitism, seeks another diasporic space in North America. Projected against the historical backdrop of the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, the immigration narratives are viewed through the lens of assimilation, its trials and failures; in particular, we investigate why efforts of social, cultural and economic inclusion cannot be mistaken with imposing on a given minority the values of majority. One of the main points of interests is the creative self ‘s reaction to the challenges of radical otherness, such as the new environment, its cultural codes and language barriers. We discuss the manifold strategies of artistic (self)-representations of the Jewish writers, many of whom came from East Central European shtetls to be confronted again with economic hardship and assimilation to the American metropolitan space and life style. During this course, we inquire how the condition called assimilation and its attendants—integration, secularization, acculturation, cosmopolitanism, etc.—are adapted or resisted according to the generational differences, a given historical moment or inherited strategies of survival and adaptation. We seek answers to the perennial question why some émigré writers react negatively to the social, moral and cultural values of the host country and others seize them as a creative opportunity. Students are acquainted with problems of cultural and linguistic isolation and/ or integration, hybrid identity formation and cultural transmission through a wide array of artistic genres—a novel, short story, memoir, photography, and illustration. The course draws on the autobiographical writings of Polish-Jewish, Russian-Jewish, and American-Jewish authors such as Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, Isaac B. Singer, Eva Hoffman and others; all texts are read in English.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(ANTH 25908,ANTH 35908,CMLT 23301,CMLT 33301,NEHC 20568,NEHC 30568)

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29010/39010 Strangers to Ourselves: Émigré Lit from Russia and SE Europe

(CMLT 26902,CMLT 36902)

“Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking,” writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath—speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise.

(REES 39013,CMLT 23401,CMLT 33401,ISHU 22606,NEHC 20573,NEHC 30573)

How and why do national identities provoke the deep emotional attachments that they do? In this course we try to understand these emotional attachments by examining the narrative of loss and redemption through which most nations in the Balkans retell their Ottoman past. We begin by considering the mythic temporality of the Romantic national narrative while focusing on specific national literary texts where the national past is retold through the formula of original wholeness, foreign invasion, Passion, and Salvation. We then proceed to unpack the structural role of the different elements of that narrative. With the help of Žižek’s theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we think about the national fixation on the trauma of loss, and the role of trauma in the formation of national consciousness. Specific theme inquiries involve the figure of the Janissary as self and other, brotherhood and fratricide, and the writing of the national trauma on the individual physical body. Special attention is given to the general aesthetic of victimhood, the casting of the victimized national self as the object of the “other’s perverse desire.” With the help of Freud, Žižek, and Kant we consider the transformation of national victimhood into the sublimity of the national self. The main primary texts include Petar Njegoš’ Mountain Wreath (Serbia and Montenegro), Ismail Kadare’s The Castle (Albania), Anton Donchev’s Time of Parting (Bulgaria).

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29018 /39018 Imaginary Worlds: The Fantastic and Magic Realism from Russia and Southeastern Europe

In this course, we will ask what constitutes the fantastic and magic realism as literary genres while reading some of the most interesting writings to have come out of Russia and Southeastern Europe. While considering the stylistic and narrative specificities of this narrative mode, we also think about its political functions —from subversive to escapist, to supportive of a nationalist imaginary—in different contexts and at different historic moments in the two regions.

2016-2017 Spring
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29020 /39020 The Shadows of Living Things: the Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov.

(FNDL 29020)

“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people…. Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil.

Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death.  The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand Master and Margarita.

2016-2017 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29023 /39023 Returning the Gaze: the West and the Rest

(CMLT 23201,CMLT 33201,NEHC 20885,NEHC 30885)

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself—self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization—and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

POLI 24100 - 24200 - 24300/40100 - 40200 - 40300 Polish Through Literary Reading I, II, III

An advanced language course emphasizing spoken and written Polish. Readings include original Polish prose and poetry as well as nonfiction. Intensive grammar review and vocabulary building. For students who have taken Third Year Polish and for native or heritage speakers who want to read Polish literature in the original. Readings and discussions in Polish.

POLI 20403/30403, 20503/30503, 20603/30503 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 24100 - 24200 - 24300/40100 - 40200 - 40300 Polish Through Literary Reading I, II, III

An advanced language course emphasizing spoken and written Polish. Readings include original Polish prose and poetry as well as nonfiction. Intensive grammar review and vocabulary building. For students who have taken Third Year Polish and for native or heritage speakers who want to read Polish literature in the original. Readings and discussions in Polish.

POLI 20403/30403, 20503/30503, 20603/30503 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 24100 - 24200 - 24300/40100 - 40200 - 40300 Polish Through Literary Reading I, II, III

An advanced language course emphasizing spoken and written Polish. Readings include original Polish prose and poetry as well as nonfiction. Intensive grammar review and vocabulary building. For students who have taken Third Year Polish and for native or heritage speakers who want to read Polish literature in the original. Readings and discussions in Polish.

POLI 20403/30403, 20503/30503, 20603/30503 or equivalent.

Kinga Kosmala
2016-2017 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS Second-Year Russian I, II, III

PQ: Russ 10300 or Consent of Instructor, Drill Sessions to be arranged.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS. It assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast amount of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year with each unit. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers, cultural events, and dinner parties. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21002 - 21102 - 21202 Fourth-Year Russian: Short Story I, II, III

PQ: RUSS 20902 or Consent of Instructor.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Russian I, II, III

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g. communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students’ native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 10:30-11:20. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Russian I, II, III

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g. communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students’ native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 10:30-11:20. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Polish I, II, III

This course teaches students to speak, read, and write in Polish, as well as familiarizes them with Polish culture. It employs the most up-to-date techniques of language teaching (e.g. communicative and accelerated learning, and learning based on students’ native language skills), as well as multileveled target-language exposure. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 10:30-11:20. Drill sessions to be arranged.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 10103 - 10203 - 10303 First-Year Russian I, II, III

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

REES 20004 Lolita

(FNDL 25300,GNSE 24900,ENGL 28916)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Russian I, II, III

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS. It assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast amount of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year with each unit. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers, cultural events, and dinner parties. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week.

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Russian I, II, III

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student’s level of preparation. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 10:30-11:20. Drill sessions to be arranged.
 

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

BCSN 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I, II, III

The Second-Year course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages and cultures is a continuation of First-Year BCS. It assumes one year of formal study of the target language(s) or equivalent coursework elsewhere. The course is focused on spoken and written modern BCS, emphasizing communicative practice in authentic cultural contexts. The language(s) are introduced through a series of dialogues gathered from a variety of textbooks published in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, as well as newspaper articles, short biographies, poems, and song lyrics in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. A vast amount of audiovisual materials, representing both high and popular culture, constitute an integral part of every unit. Simultaneously, aural comprehension, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary are reinforced and further developed throughout the year with each unit. The course is complemented with cultural and historical media from the Balkans, guest speakers, cultural events, and dinner parties. Mandatory drill sessions are held twice per week.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student’s level of preparation. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 10:30-11:20. Drill sessions to be arranged.
 

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20103 - 20203 - 20303 Second-Year Polish I, II, III

This course includes instruction in grammar, writing, and translation, as well as watching selected Polish movies. Selected readings are drawn from the course textbook, and students also read Polish short stories and press articles. In addition, the independent reading of students is emphasized and reinforced by class discussions. Work is adjusted to each student’s level of preparation. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 10:30-11:20. Drill sessions to be arranged.
 

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third-Year Russian: Culture I, II, III

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third-Year Russian: Culture I, II, III

PQ: RUSS 20300 or Consent of Instructor

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 - 20802 - 20902 Third-Year Russian: Culture I, II, III

PQ: RUSS 20300 or Consent of Instructor

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21002 - 21102 - 21202 Fourth-Year Russian: Short Story I, II, III

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 21002 - 21102 - 21202 Fourth-Year Russian: Short Story I, II, III

PQ: RUSS 20902 or Consent of Instructor.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21100 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Fiction

This course, which encompasses both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, changes the focus from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. Each module foregrounds a different theme and leverages a different medium—fiction, film, art and architecture, urban anthropology, etc. Unlike the First- and Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) courses, Advanced BCS courses are not in sequence, and students can take them randomly, over the course of two academic years to fulfill their 3rd and/or 4th year of language study.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

BCSN 21200 Advanced Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Language through Film

This course, which encompasses both the 3rd and 4th years of language study, changes the focus from language structure and grammar to issues in interdisciplinary content. Each module foregrounds a different theme and leverages a different medium—fiction, film, art and architecture, urban anthropology, etc. Unlike the First- and Second-Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) courses, Advanced BCS courses are not in sequence, and students can take them randomly, over the course of two academic years to fulfill their 3rd and/or 4th year of language study.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21600 Russian for Heritage Learners

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 24400 Twentieth Century Central and East European Theater

This course provides an introduction to drama, performance, and production in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Focusing on major developments in Czech, Russian and Polish theatrical practice, we will examine the relationship between the performance and the dramatic text, changing approaches to both the practical and creative work of staging a play, and the social and political climates that impacted theatrical production. Rather than attempting a broad survey of Central and East European theater, we will focus our attention on major turning points, high and low moments, and major innovators and innovations in theatrical culture.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

RUSS 29910 Special Topics in Advanced Russian

Must complete Advanced Russian through Media or equivalent, or obtain consent of instructor. Class meets for 2 hours each week.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502 /30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502/30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

PQ: RUSS 21202 or Consent of Instructor.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

RUSS 21302 - 21402 - 21502 /30102 - 30202 - 30302 Advanced Russian Through Media I, II, III

PQ: RUSS 21202 or Consent of Instructor.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

POLI 30103 - 30203 - 30303 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

PQ: POLI 20300 or equivalent. The process of learning in all three quarters of Third Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize the Polish life, culture and history: in the Fall Quarter – the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter – the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter – the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 11:30-12:20. Conversation hour to be arranged.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 30103 - 30203 - 30303 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

PQ: POLI 20300 or equivalent. The process of learning in all three quarters of Third Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize the Polish life, culture and history: in the Fall Quarter – the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter – the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter – the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 11:30-12:20. Conversation hour to be arranged.

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 30103 - 30203 - 30303 Third-Year Polish I, II, III

PQ: POLI 20300 or equivalent. The process of learning in all three quarters of Third Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize the Polish life, culture and history: in the Fall Quarter – the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter – the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter – the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Meets on MWF 11:30-12:20. Conversation hour to be arranged.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

REES 25601 /35601 Russian Media Culture

Over the past 150 years, various political and cultural regimes of Russia have systematically exploited the gap between experience and representation to create their own mediated worlds--from the tight censorship of the imperial and Soviet periods, to the propaganda of the Soviet period and the recent use of media simulacra for strategic geo-political advantage. During this same period state control of media has been used to seclude Russia from the advancement of liberalism, market economics, individual rights, modernist art, Freud, Existentialism and, more recently, western discourses of inclusion, sustainability, and identity. Examining this history, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether the architects of Russian culture have been hopelessly backward or shrewd phenomenologists, keenly aware of the relativity of experience and of their ability to shape it. This course will explore the worlds that these practices produce, with an emphasis on Russia’s recent confrontations with western culture and power, and including various practices of subversion of media control, such as illegal printing and circulation. Texts for the course will draw from print, sound and visual media, and fields of analysis will include aesthetics, cultural history and media theory.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26047 /36047 Pushkin and Gogol

(FNDL 26047)

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is widely considered the founding genius of modern Russian literature, especially in his lyric and epic poetry; Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) injected a manic strain of magic realism to create the modern Russian novel. Apollon Grigor’ev later called Pushkin “our everything”; Dostoevsky claimed “We all emerged out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” During the quarter we will read a representative selection of both writers’ major works, including Pushkin’s verse novel Evgenii Onegin, verse epic The Bronze Horseman, and novel The Captain’s Daughter, and Gogol’s novel Dead Souls in addition to his fantastic stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.” We will focus on close readings of the texts, paying particular attention to their experiments with literary form, as well as attending to their broader historical contextualization. We will focus particularly on the conceptions of realism projected by the texts and imposed by later readers. All readings will be in English translation.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 26048 /36048 Russian Cinema

(CMST 24505, CMST 34505)

Russian cinema occupies an important and distinctive place within world film culture. It rose to prominence in the 1920s through the revolutionary (in all senses) films and film theory of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and others and maintained its distinction through the early years of socialist realism, a unique media system in which film was recognized, in Lenin’s saying, as “the most important of the arts.” After Stalin’s death Russian film re-captivated its revolutionary energy amidst the “Soviet new wave,” characterized by the films of Mikhail Kalatozov, Sergei Paradzhanov and Andrei Tarkovsky. In recent years film has continued to play a crucial role in defining and animating a post-Soviet cultural identity, both through poetic filmmakers as Aleksandr Sokurov and through genre films. We will survey this history, from 1917 right up to the present moment, with a selection of the most energizing films and theoretical writings by their makers. We will examine how a national style gets established and maintained; how film form and film style have responded to the pressures of ideology and power; how film art has served both as a tool of colonialization and identity-formation; and how film artists have negotiated the pressures of cultural tradition (including that of the Russian novel) and the world film market.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27003 /37003 Narratives of Assimilation

(JWSC 20223)

This course offers a survey of the manifold artistic strategies of (self)-representations of the Jewish writers from East Central Europe from the perspective of assimilation, its trials, successes and failures. During this course, we will inquire how the condition called assimilation and its attendants: secularization, acculturation, trans-nationalism, etc. has been explored by Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Adolf Rudnicki, Eva Hoffman and others. Students will be acquainted with problems of cultural alienation and linguistic isolation, hybrid identity, and cultural transmission in conjunction with theoretical approaches by Zygmunt Bauman, Benjamin Harshav, Ryszard Nycz; all texts are read in English.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 27024 /37024 Tear Down This Wall!: Language and Society in 20th Century Poland

This course surveys the pragmatics and sociolinguistic aspects of language usage in propaganda and mass media in Poland throughout the 20th century. Poland was an epicenter of the tumultuous 20th century: two world wars, a short period of independence, communism, the Solidarity movement, entrance into the European Union, and becoming one of Europe’s leading economies. These extreme shifts have been reflected in the Polish language. This course will introduce students to the role of language as an active participant in Poland's history through an analysis of the languages of dominant discourse and commodification (propaganda, media, pop culture) and will examine the tactics of influence from a linguistic point of view.

Erik Houle, Kinga Kosmala
2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore

(NEHC 20568,NEHC 30568,CMLT 23301,CMLT 33301,ANTH 25908,ANTH 35908)

Immerse yourself in the magic world of vampires and dragons, bagpipes and uneven beats, quick-step circle dance. This course give an introduction to Balkan folklore from anthropological, historical/political, and performative perspectives. We become acquainted with folk tales, lyric and epic songs, music, and dance. The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who developed their theory of oral composition through work among epic singers in the Balkans, helps us understand folk tradition as a dynamic process – how is oral tradition transmitted, preserved, changed, forgotten? how do illiterate singers learn their long narrative poems, how do musicians learn to play? We consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. The historical/political part will survey the emergence of folklore studies as a discipline as well as the ways it has served in the formation and propagation of the nation in the Balkans. The class will also experience this living tradition first hand through our in-class workshop with the Chicago based dance ensemble “Balkanski igri.” The Annual Balkan Folklore Spring Festival will be held in March at the International House.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29012 /39012 Returning the Gaze: The Balkans and Western Europe

(CMLT 23201,CMLT 33201,NEHC 20885,NEHC 30885)

This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery.  We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard.  We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself -- self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization -- and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. 

Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise

(CMLT 23401,CMLT 33401,NEHC 20573,NEHC 30573,HIST 24005,HIST 34005)

The Other Within the Self: Identity in Balkan Literature and Film. This two-course sequence examines discursive practices in a number of literary and cinematic works from the South East corner of Europe through which identities in the region become defined by two distinct others: the “barbaric, demonic” Ottoman and the “civilized” Western European. This course begins by defining the nation both historically and conceptually, with attention to Romantic nationalism and its flourishing in Southeastern Europe. We then look at the narrative of original wholeness, loss, and redemption through which Balkan countries retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Freud's analysis of masochistic desire and Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity. The figure of the Janissary highlights the significance of the other in the definition of the self. Some possible texts are Petar Njegoš's Mountain Wreath; Ismail Kadare's The Castle; and Anton Donchev's Time of Parting.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Literature and Linguistics

REES 29016 /39016 Gender in the Balkans: Sworn Virgins, Wounded Men & Eternal Mothers

(CMLT 23902,CMLT 33902, GNSE 27607)

Through some of the best literary and cinematic works from Southeastern Europe, we will consider the questions of socialization into gendered modes of being – the demands, comforts, pleasures and frustrations that individuals experience while trying to embody and negotiate social categories. We will examine how masculinity and femininity are constituted in the traditional family model, the socialist paradigm, and during post-socialist transitions. We will also contemplate how gender categories are experienced through other forms of identity–the national and socialist especially–as well as how gender is used to symbolize and animate these other identities. The course assumes no prior knowledge of the history of Southeastern Europe, literature or gender theory. All readings in English translation.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics

POLI 20503 - 20603 - 20703/40103 - 40203 - 40303 Polish Through Literary Readings I, II, III

PQ: POLI 303 or equivalent. An advanced language course emphasizing spoken and written Polish. Readings include original Polish prose and poetry as well as nonfiction. Intensive grammar review and vocabulary building. For students who have taken Third Year Polish and for native or heritage speakers who want to read Polish literature in the original. Readings and discussions in Polish. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

2015-2016 Spring
Category
Language

POLI 20503 - 20603 - 20703/40103 - 40203 - 40303 Polish Through Literary Readings I, II, III

PQ: POLI 303 or equivalent. An advanced language course emphasizing spoken and written Polish. Readings include original Polish prose and poetry as well as nonfiction. Intensive grammar review and vocabulary building. For students who have taken Third Year Polish and for native or heritage speakers who want to read Polish literature in the original. Readings and discussions in Polish. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

2015-2016 Winter
Category
Language

POLI 20503 - 20603 - 20703/40103 - 40203 - 40303 Polish Through Literary Readings I, II, III

PQ: POLI 303 or equivalent. An advanced language course emphasizing spoken and written Polish. Readings include original Polish prose and poetry as well as nonfiction. Intensive grammar review and vocabulary building. For students who have taken Third Year Polish and for native or heritage speakers who want to read Polish literature in the original. Readings and discussions in Polish. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

2015-2016 Autumn
Category
Language

RUSS 20702 Third-Year Russian through Culture I

This course, which is intended for third-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context and emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Excerpts from popular Soviet/Russian films and clips from Russian television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Drill practice is held twice a week.

RUSS 20300 (two years of Russian) or equivalent.

Category
Language

REES 20004 Lolita

(FNDL 25300 / ENGL 28916 / GNSE 24900 / SIGN 26027)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration. (B)

Autumn
Category
Literature and Linguistics