REES

“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.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

This course examines the works written by Tolstoy after Anna Karenina, when he abandoned the novel as a form and gave up his copyright. Readings include his influential writings on non-violence and vegetarianism, his challenges to church and state authority, as well as later literary works, which some believe surpass the famous novels he had renounced. We will also explore the particularities of Tolstoy’s charisma in these years, when he came to be viewed as a second Tsar in Russia and as a moral authority throughout the world.

"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.

When most Americans think about "the left," Marxism, Soviet state socialism, or European social democracy spring to mind. This class will explore alternative—but now largely forgotten—blueprints for revolutionizing the political and social order that emerged in the nineteenth century. We will pay special attention to utopian socialism, early anticolonial movements, the Jewish Labor Bund, and anarchism. Examining the intellectual underpinnings of these movements, their influence on the modern world, and the factors that led to their demise, we will also consider what lessons they can teach to those committed to realizing a better future today.

This course will examine attempts to build harmonious sustainable communities in the U.S., U.S.S.R., and around the world. Our content will be historical, philosophical and literary, and will include communal charters, purpose statements, and architectural plans— alongside testimonies to success and memoirs of failure. We will identify patterns and principles that differentiate communal societies from those surrounding them, and consider the relationship of these to the systematic failures and successes of experiments in alternative living. We will also consider the personalities involved: of the founders, stalwart communards, wandering seekers, and troublemakers. We will ask the hard questions that these communities have continually faced, considering how shared space transforms shared beliefs and aspirations, why the latter have been so difficult to sustain, and how the commune could be made to work.

Chicago claims to have the largest Polish and Polish-American population in the US and yet the city’s distinctly Polish neighborhoods are now only history as their population has dispersed or moved to the suburbs. This course explores the diminishing presence of Poles against the lasting input of the material culture which they introduced to the urban spaces of Chicago. The course is framed by the fundamentals of thing discourse and employs the mediums of sculpture, fashion, photography, architecture and topography of the Polish community in Chicago through several field trips. The course’s main goal is to map the evolution of the former Polish neighborhoods which often concluded with the erasure of their distinct ethno-space. In order to grasp the status of such changes, students take several field trips to the former Polish neighborhoods and visit their existing architectural landmarks and cultural institutions.

Towards the end of the course, students conduct several interviews with Polish Chicagoans from the postwar and Solidarity immigrations. The course concludes with a capstone project for which students will make a virtual collection of artifacts designed as a curio cabinet filled with objects they found, created, and purchased during their research and field trips.

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.

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.”

This course provides a historical, literary, and political survey of Russia’s encounters with black peoples, from the reign of Peter the Great to the administration of Vladimir Putin. Drawing on a variety of sources, including novels, autobiographies, film, media reports, and contemporary scholarly research, the course explores the concepts of race, belonging, and otherness/duality as they evolved in the varying historical contexts of Russia’s encounters with “blackness.” Particular attention is paid to comparisons of racialization and racial injustice in America and in Russia, as gleaned from the biographies of black “Russophiles” such as Frederick Bruce Thomas and Paul Robeson, as well as from the memoirs and writings of figures such as Alexander Pushkin, Langston Hughes, and Yelena Khanga. From classic Russian literature, to Soviet propaganda, to contemporary geopolitics, the course asks: How has “blackness” been historically understood and/or used by Russians, and what cultural and political legacies has that left in Russia’s post-imperial and post-Soviet space?