Undergraduate

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.