2022-2023 Course Offerings
Autumn
REES 24425 Invasion Culture: Russia Through its Wars
A look at contemporary culture through Russia’s invasions, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Broadly, this course explores how war determines 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, How are Russia’s wars fought in the domain of culture?
(CMLT 24425/REES 34425)
REES 29013 /39013 The Burden of History: A Nation and Its Lost Paradise
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. (CMLT 23401 / CMLT 33401 / HIST 24005 / HIST 34005 / NEHC 20573 / NEHC 30573)
REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveillance
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). (CMLT 29024 / CMLT 39024 )
REES 31005 Bruno Schulz: An Unfinished Project
This course examines the prose (fiction and non-fiction) and visual oeuvre of “the hidden genius” of Polish-Jewish modernism--Bruno Schulz--who perished in the Holocaust. 2022 marks the 130th anniversary of his birth and the 80th anniversary of his death, both of which occurred in the town of Drohobycz on the southeastern border of interwar Poland. During the course, we will focus on Schulz's concept of creation through his use of an aesthetics of trash and debased form, the kabbalistic origins of the fragment as a form, de-narrativized temporality and its moments, and myths of the provincial and of childhood. We will seek critical perspectives on his artistic predilection for parochial places, conspiratorial viewpoints, and fetishistic masochism--in sum, for those components of his writings which made his brilliant response to the world like no other in his time. In turn, generations of writers (John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, etc.) responded to him in their own writings, which will be engaged in the class, seeking a dialogic continuation of his tragically interrupted work. All readings are in English translation. (JWSC 26360)
Winter
REES 26072/36072: The Roots of War: the History and Culture Behind the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Since the beginning of Russia's war on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and his entourage have created false historical constructions that serve as the basis for their aggressive policy. The main question of this course is: to what extent is Putin's retro-policy historically grounded, traditional and natural? An analysis of the rhetoric and historiosophy of the modern Russian elite will reveal the sources they been drawn upon. Is there a connection between Muscovite Russia, the Russian Empire and modern Russian neo-imperialism? What role does the legacy of the USSR play in the political system, state structure and foreign policy of the modern Russian Federation? Where do historical trends, national interests and the new imperial ideology coincide and contradict each other? We will also discuss the modern history of opposition to Putin's authoritarianism and trace the history and cultural significance of democratic institutions in Russia. Finally, we will use the history of Ukrainian statehood and the processes of formation of the Ukrainian nation to shed alternative perspective on recent Russian views of Ukraine.
REES 20027/30027 Dostoevsky’s Demons
Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of Dostoevsky’s novels as polyphonic works, in which characters are free of ideological subordination to the author and thus more fully embody radically different points of view, has been highly compelling as a model for novelistic discourse particularly in the West. There are other views of Dostoevsky, however. In Russia, more attention has been paid to his faith in Orthodox Christianity, which he believed could resolve the intense conflicts that dominate his novels, and to his view that the Russian national character might have the power to unite humanity under universal values. In this course we will read the novel Demons against the backdrop of these ideas, but also in the context of contemporary Russia, where notions of national destiny and sovereign ideals have been used to justify repression and invasion. Our method of reading will be straight out of Dostoevsky and Bakhtin, as students will be invited to adopt the most diverse perspectives and to argue their ideas as if possessed. (FNDL 20027)
REES 27007/37007: Mapping Our Selves: Identity and Subjectivity
This course examines how different collective and individual selves develop, change, and get mobilized in modern Eastern and Central Europe. As Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment, and national ideas spread across Europe, the understanding of self and subjectivity was fundamentally transformed. In Eastern and Central Europe, themselves terms that have their roots in these changes, this occurred at a tumultuous time of changes of borders, countries, and forms of government. This course focuses primarily on cultures and literatures in Poland’s different forms of existence and non-existence, a locus central to these dynamics. We will ask such questions as: What does it mean to develop a sense of a nation without a territorial state or within an empire? What kind of subject do different works of art elicit and why? Under what circumstances does identity become a more engaging understanding of the self? What are its borders and porousness? We will be reading a variety of literary, artistic, and theoretical works from the 18th to 21st centuries, among them Immanuel Kant on Enlightenment subjectivity, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the form and future of Poland, Karl Marx on base and superstructure, and Louis Althusser on the dynamics of getting drawn into a society and economic system (interpellation); as well as Polish authors probing these issues and tensions, such as Witkacy, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Andrzej Stasiuk, Debora Vogel, and Stanisław Brzozowski.
REES 26040/36040 Between Power and Powerlessness: Theater in East and Central Europe
National independence movements, revolutions, authoritarian regimes, and the decline of empire: playwrights in East and Central Europe wrote major works of world literature in response to these events – and sometimes in prescient anticipation of them. This seminar introduces students to the plays that, from Chekhov to Havel, shaped the fates of nations. Topics include: the avant-garde, theater of the absurd, acting methods, performance art, and documentary theater.
(TAPS 25215/35215)
REES 27032/37032 Bodies, Objects, Cognition
This course explores the differences between objects and embodiment as examined in varied historical periods and artistic genres. We will probe the ontological indeterminacy of embodied beings versus machines in terms of agency, autonomy, subjectivity, and artificiality. Our main operative mode is a visual-verbal comparison and its perception. Through discussions of such visual strategies as pareidolia, abstraction, bodyscape, as well as the scientific phenomena of cloning and humanoid robotics, the course will destabilize once fundamental epistemologies to present a cognitive moment when the traditionally stable object-body dichotomy is understood anew as a dynamic site of affective, biological, representational, and mechanical relations. Visual artists, writers and critics studied will include Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Tadeusz Borowski, Stanislaw Lem, Allan Teger, Magdalena Abakanowicz, W.T.J. Mitchell and others. All readings are in English. ANTH 27032/ 37032, KNOW 27032/ 37032
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 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. (FNDL 29020 )
REES 29023 Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest
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. CMLT 29023 / CMLT 39023 / HIST 23609 / HIST 33609 / NEHC 29023 / NEHC 39023 / REES 39023
REES 37031 Between Phenomenology and Formalism: A Seminar in Literary Theory and Philosophy
The course opens with a discussion of the distant origins of phenomenology and formalism as dominant approaches in East Central European literary criticism during the interwar period. In the case of phenomenology, the course discussion harks back to the 19th century Franz Brentano's work on intentionality at Charles University in Prague; the conceptualization of the Russian Formalists also gets an originary treatment beginning in the Opojaz and Moscow Linguistic Circle etc. Moving chronologically, the course includes Edmund Husserl's basic notions of phenomenology paralleled by readings from Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp and Boris Eikhenbaum. The introduction of Roman Ingarden's monumental conceptualization of literature in his The Literary Work of Art leads to exploration of his pioneering work on reader response theory in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Our overview of literary phenomenology concludes with readings from Jan Patočka. Finally, we explore Kazimierz Wóycicki's work to help us understand how the Polish version of formalism reached its peak in the 1960s and 70s in the guise of structuralism. All readings are in English.
REES 26012 (HIST 14000) Introduction to Russian Civilization II
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. (HIST 14000 / SOSC 24100)
Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required. | Abigail Holekamp
Spring
Paris Russian Civilization
The College-sponsored Russian Civilization in Paris program provides undergraduate students with an opportunity to explore the history and culture of Russia and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on the region’s rich cultural ties with France.
For more information, see Study Abroad: Paris Russian Civ
ENST 27210 Where We Come From: Methods & Materials in the Study of Immigration
This course provides an interactive survey of methodologies that engage the experiences of immigrants in Chicago. Exploring practices ranging from history to fiction, activism to memorialization, this course will introduce students to a variety of the ways that immigrants and scholars have approached the Second City. Enrollment is based on acceptance into the Chicago Studies Quarter Program.
REES 29700 Reading/Research: Russian and Eastern European Studies
This is the second part of an independent study course which is arranged, planned, and managed by a supervising professor in conjunction with the goals that are proposed by the student, and then refined and approved by the supervising professor. This course involves more student self-discipline and a greater sense of direction than do most courses--the student must be willing to plan and execute his/her activities with much less monitoring and without prompting by fellow classmates. The student and the professor discuss and propose goals, topics, and projects.
REES 39700 Reading/Research: Russian and Eastern Eastern European Studies
This is a specially designed course not normally offered as part of the curriculum that is arranged between a student and a faculty member. Instructor consent required.
REES 26070: Post-Soviet Ukraine
This course focuses on the cultural life of Ukraine after the Soviet collapse. In a guided process, students will co-facilitate this syllabus, deciding on topics and readings in (translated) Ukrainian literature and film as well as the history of Ukraine. Possible topics include: memory of Soviet wars, the capitalist transition, Chornobyl, artistic movements, subcultures, the Maidan Revolution, Russia's war, language politics, ethnicities, and gender relations. Reading options include Andryukhovich, Zabuzhko, Plokhy, Zhadan. No prior knowledge required.
BPRO 29943: Diasporic Narratives and Memories
Diasporic Narratives and Memories: Designing a New Concept for a Multi-Ethnic Museum of Belarusian Emigration. This course project takes the instability of Belarusian identity as an advantage for creating a new model of multi-ethnic, open emigrant community with a potential of cooperative democratic integration into a larger multi-ethnic landscape of Chicago. This project’s relevance goes beyond the Chicago community, offering a model of multi-ethnic integration for building a civil society in the Belarusian homeland. The course will involve theoretical readings in the studies of diaspora, training in oral histories gathering provided by the Chicago History Museum, and weekly field trips to the diasporic museums in Chicago. We will analyze these museums’ curatorial and narrative concepts in order to build upon their strengths and to avoid their weaknesses. This course is part of IFK's Experimental Capstone (XCAP) program for students interested in building upon their experience by adding practice, impact, and influence as important dimensions of their undergraduate work.
(CHST 29943/CMLT 29943/CRES 29943/HIPS 26943/KNOW 29943/MAPH 39943/REES 29950)
Olga Solovieva and Bożena Shallcross
JWSC 20223 Narratives of Assimilation
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. (NEHC 20223/NEHC 30223/REES 27003/REES 37003/RLST 26623)
REES 29009 /39009 Balkan Folklore
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.” (ANTH 25908 / ANTH 35908 / CMLT 23301 / CMLT 33301 / NEHC 20568 / NEHC 30568)
ENST 27125 Voices of Alterity and the Languages of Immigration
This course investigates the individual experience of immigration: How do immigrants recreate themselves in this alien world in which they seem to lose part of themselves? How do they find their voices and make a place for themselves in their adoptive homes? If in the new world the immigrant becomes a new person, what meanings are still carried in traditional values and culture? How do they remember their origins and record new experiences? Enrollment is based on acceptance into the Chicago Studies Quarter Program. (CMLT 27125/ENGL 27125/HIST 27710/PBPL 27125/REES 29025)
ENST 27330 Spaces of Hope: The City and Its Immigrants
“The city is the site where people of all origins and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life.” (David Harvey) This course will use the urban studies lens to explore the complex history of immigration to Chicago, with close attention to communities of East European origin. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic materials, we will study the ways in which the city and its new citizens transform one another. Enrollment is based on acceptance into the Chicago Studies Quarter Program. HIST 27713/PBPL 27330/REES 21500.
Nada Petković