Undergraduate

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.