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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Humanities & Social Science Sector. Class of 2010 & beyond. Platt. No prior language experience required. This course covers 19C Russian cultural and social history. Each week-long unit is organized around a single medium- length text (novella, play, memoir) which opens up a single scene of social historybirth, death, duel, courtship, tsar, and so on. Each of these main texts is accompanied by a set of supplementary materialspaintings, historical readings, cultural-analytical readings, excerpts from other literary works, etc. The object of the course is to understand the social codes and rituals that informed nineteenth-century Russian life, and to apply this knowledge in interpreting literary texts, other cultural objects, and even historical and social documents (letters, memoranda, etc.). We will attempt to understand social history and literary interpretation as separate disciplinesyet also as disciplines that can inform one another. In short: we will read the social history through the text, and read the text against the social history.
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3.00 Credits
Arts & Letters Sector. All Classes. Steiner. Major Russian writers in English translation: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, early Tolstoy, and early Dostoevsky.
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3.00 Credits
Arts & Letters Sector. All Classes. Steiner. Major Russian writers in English translation: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pasternak, Babel, Solzhenitsyn, and others.
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3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Todorov. The purpose of this course is to present the Russian and East European contribution to world cinema in terms of film theory, experimentation with the cinematic language, and social and political reflex. We discuss major themes and issues such as: the invention of montage, the means of visual propaganda and the cinematic component to the communist cultural revolutions, party ideology and practices of social engineering, cinematic response to the emergence of the totalitarian state in Russia and its subsequent installation in Eastern Europe after World War II; repression, resistance and conformity under such a system; legal and illegal desires; the nature of the authoritarian personality, the mind and the body of homo sovieticus; sexual and political transgression; treason and disgrace; public degradation and individual redemption; the profane and the sublime ends of human suffering and humiliation; the unmasking of the official "truth" as a general lie.
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3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Hist & Tradition. Class of 2009 & prior only. Todorov. This course studies the emergence of organized terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia. It examines the philosophy of the terrorist struggle through its methods, causes, various codes, and manifestoes that defined its nature for the times to come. We critique intellectual movements such as nihilism, anarchism, and populism that inspired terrorism defining the political violence and disorder as beneficial acts. The issue of policing terrorism becomes central when we study a police experiment to infiltrate, delegitimize and ultimately neutralize terrorist networks in late imperial Russia. The discussions draw on the ideology and political efficacy of the conspiratorial mode of operation, terrorist tactics such as assassination and hostage-taking, the cell structure of the groups and underground incognito of the strikers, their maniacal self-denial, revolutionary asceticism, underground mentality, faceless omnipotence, and other attributes-intensifiers of its mystique. We analyze the technology and phenomenology of terror that generate asymmetrical disorganizing threats to any organized form of government and reveal the terrorist act as a sublime end as well as a lever for achieving practical causes. Our study traces the rapid proliferation of terrorism in the twentieth century and its impact on the public life in Western Europe, the The discussions draw on the ideology and political efficacy of the conspiratorial mode of operation, terrorist tactics such as assassination and hostage-taking, the cell structure of the groups and underground incognito of the strikers, their maniacal self-denial, revoluntionary asceticism, underground mentality, faceless omnipotence, and other attributes-intensifiers of its mystique. We analyze the technology and phenomenology of terror that generate symmetrical disorganizing threats to any organized form of government and reveal the terrorist act as a sublime end as well as a lever for achieving practical causes. Our study traces the rapid proliferation of terrorism in the twentieth century and its impact on the public life in Western Europe, the Balkans, and America.
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3.00 Credits
Humanities & Social Science Sector. Class of 2010 & beyond. Platt. Representations of war have been created for as many reasons as wars are fought: to legitimate conflict, to celebrate military glory, to critique brutality, to vilify an enemy, to mobilize popular support, to generate national pride, etc. In this course we will examine a series of representations of war drawn from the literature, film, state propa^ganda, memoirs, visual art, etc. of Russia, Europe and the United States of the twentieth century. The course will be conducted largely as a seminar. However, I will also give occasional lectures on specified topics (especially, on the historical groundwork necessary to understand our largely literary readings). A common place of critical dis^cussions of war concerns the impossibility of the adequate representa^tion of exper^ience that in many ways defies understanding or even recall. In this con^nection, we will be developing a vocabulary of aesthetic and psychological terms relevant to the task of reflecting the impossibilities of life and death in wartime. The goal of the course is to acquire knowledge of literary and cultural history in social and historical context, and to acquire critical skills for analysis of rhetorical and visual representations.
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3.00 Credits
Amico. Russia's history has been one not only of violent wars and turbulent revolutions, but also one of a vibrant cultural creation. In this course we will examine Russian music from an ethnomusicological perspective, in relation to these historical, social and cultural contexts. Our studies will take us from the nineteenth century to the present, and from the elite music of the concert hall, to the various rural sites of music making, up to the contemporary urban dance club. Among the topics to be considered: the relationships between art music and movements in both literature and the visual arts; how music supports, subverts or simply "avoids" contributing to political life; how gender is performed in music; and how globalization, technological advances, and piracy change the ways music is created and used.
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3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Todorov. This course studies the development of 19th and 20th century Russian literature through one of its most distinct and highly recognized genresthe short story. The readings include great masters of fiction such as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and others. The course presents the best works of short fiction and situates them in a literary process that contributes to the history of a larger cultural-political context. Students will learn about the historical formation, poetic virtue, and thematic characteristics of major narrative modes such as romanticism, utopia, realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism. We critique the strategic use of various devices of literary representation such as irony, absurd, satire, grotesque, anecdote, etc. Some of the main topics and issues include: culture of the duel; the role of chance; the riddle of death; anatomy of madness; imprisonment and survival; the pathologies of St. Petersburg; terror and homo sovieticus.
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3.00 Credits
Humanities & Social Science Sector. Class of 2010 & beyond. Vinitsky. All readings and lectures in English. This course will explore the theme of madness in Russian literature and arts from the medieval period through the October Revolution of 1917. The discussion will include formative masterpieces by Russian writers (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Bulgakov), painters (Repin, Vrubel, Filonov), composers (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky), and film-directors (Protazanov, Eisenstein), as well as non-fictional documents such as Russian medical, judicial, political, and philosophical treatises and essays on madness.
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3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Vinitsky. This course explores the ways Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) portrays the "inner world(s)" of his characters. Dostoevsky's psychological method will be considered against the historical, ideological, and literary contexts of middle to late nineteenth-century Russia. The course consists of three parts External World (the contexts of Dostoevsky), "Inside" Dostoevsky's World (the author's technique and ideas) and The World of Text (close reading of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov). Students will write three essays on various aspects of Dostoevsky's "spiritual realism."
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