Summer 2012

Summer Session I

RUSS197 Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture
All readings and lectures in English
Humanities and Social Sciences Sector (New Curriculum Only)
Cross-listing: COML197

910 TR 5:00 p.m. - 8:10 p.m. Vinitsky

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.

RUSS434 Media and Terrorism
All readings and lectures in English
Distribution II: History and Tradition

910 MW 4:30 p.m. - 7:40 p.m. Todorov

This course draws on fictional, cinematic and mass-media representation of terrorism based on Russian as well as Western examples. We study how the magnitude of the political impact of terrorism relates to the historically changing means of production of its striking iconology. The course exposes students to major modes of imagining, narrating, showing, reenacting terrorism and forging its mystique. We examine the emergence of organized terrorism in the 19th century Russia as an original political-cultural phenomenon. We trace its rapid expansion and influence on the public life in the West, and on the Balkans. Historical, political, and aesthetic approaches converge in a discussion of several case studies related to intellectual and spiritual movements such as nihilism, anarchism, populism, religious fundamentalism, and others. The public appearance of the terrorist activism and its major attributes are viewed as powerful intensifiers of its political effect: self-denial, ascetic aura, and stratagem of mystification, underground mentality, and martyrdom.

The pedagogical goal of this course is to promote and cultivate critical view and analytical skills that will enable students to deal with different historical as well as cultural modes of (self)representation of terrorism. Students are expected to learn and be able to deal with a large body of historical-factual and creative-interpreted information.

RUSS444 Russian Realism in European Context
All readings and lectures in English
Undergraduates require permission to register
Cross-listing: COML541

MW 12 noon - 3:00 p.m. Thorstensson

In this class we will examine works of major Russian Realist writers, painters, and composers considering them within Western ideological contexts of the 1850-1880s: positivism, materialism, behaviorism, spiritualism, etc. We will focus on Russian Realists’ ideological and aesthetic struggle against Romantic values and on an unpredicted result of this struggle -- a final “spectralization” of social and political realities they claimed to “mirror” in their works. Paradoxically, Russian Realism contributed to the creation of the image of Russia as a house haunted by numerous apparitions: nihilism and revolution, afflicted peasants and perfidious Jews, secret societies and religious sects. The “spectropoetics” (Derrida) of Russian Realism will be examined through works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Leskov, Chekhov, as well as paintings by Ilya Repin and operas by Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. Requirements include one oral presentation, mid-term theoretical survey essay, and a final paper. Relevant theories include M.H. Abrams, Brookes, Levine, Greenblatt, Castle, and Derrida.

Summer Session II

RUSS432 Fate and Chance in Literature and Culture
All readings and lectures in English
Cross-listing: CINE432; COML196

920 TR 6-9PM Zubarev

Forms a part of the LPS Masters in Liberal Arts Program. In Fate and Chance in Literature and Culture, we will explore these two interrelated concepts in comparative perspective over a broad historical range. As a result, the students will learn how the philosophy of fate and chance has been reflected in works of different Russian authors and in different cultural and political environments. In Russian as well as western systems of belief fate and chance represent two extreme visions of the universal order, or, perhaps, two diametrically opposed cosmic forces: complete determinism, on the one hand, and complete chaos or unpredictability, on the other. These visions have been greatly reflected by various mythopoetic systems. In this course, we will investigate religious and folkloric sources from a series of Russian traditions compared to other Indo-European traditions (Greek, East-European). Readings will include The Song of Prince Igor’s Campaign, The Gambler by Dostoevsky, The Queen of Spades by Pushkin, Vij by Gogol, The Black Monk by Chekhov, The Fatal Eggs by Bulgakov, and more.

Last updated on April 30, 2012