2015-2016

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.