Graduate

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.