Classes

Freshman Seminar 36g

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2019

Translation makes culture possible. Individual writers and thinkers draw sustenance and stimulation from works created outside their own cultures, and artists working in one format get ideas from those working in entirely different media. Translation between languages and between art forms will center our seminar’s work. Taking a broad view of translation as a mental activity, we will study poems, fiction, film, photography, and music. We will stretch our own imaginative capacities by transposing material across media and genres, creating homophonic translations, and translating...

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Slavic 148. Strange Russian Writers

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2018

Studies Russia's rebels, deviants, martyrs, loners, and losers as emblems of national identity. Stories, films and poems that project Russia's distinctive obsessions with history and religion. Includes Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, Kharms, Platonov, Nabokov, Petrushevskaya, Prigov; films by Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Askoldov, Sokurov.

Meets Tues. / Thurs. 11-12, plus an additional hour 

Note: All readings in...
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Slavic 287: Poetic Creation in Twentieth-Century Russia

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016

A course that examines how poems create self-images for poets working in and after Russian modernism, including Khlebnikov, Vvedenskii, Mandel'shtam, Tsvetaeva, Barkova, Brodsky, Sedakova, Shvarts, Dragomoshchenko. Relies on literary and psychoanalytic theories of identity.

Slavic 253: Reading Contemporary Russia

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2015

A Graduate Seminar in Undergraduate Education, on post-1989 Russian literature, film, and culture, and on the challenges and pleasures of studying contemporary cultural processes. Includes Brodsky, Medvedev, Pelevin, Petrushevskaya, Prigov, Shvarts, Sorokin; German, Muratova, Sokurov. Combines individual research proposals with designing an undergraduate course.

AI 11: Poetry Without Borders

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2014

This General Education course studies poetry as a cultural practice that requires and perversely challenges visual, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic borders. Main topics are translation (poems crossing borders), emigration/exile (poets crossing borders), and poetry and other arts (poems joining with music, film, photography, and philosophy). Poems and prose by Charles Bernstein, Bei Dao, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Howe, Yang Lian, Valzhyna Mort, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, and C. D. Wright, among others; theoretical texts, sound recordings, visual images,...

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Slavic 289. Elegy: The Art of Losing

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2014

Poems, films, visual artifacts, and music alongside theories of loss. Focuses on non-narrative forms, with examples from Pushkin, Baratynsky, Fet, Brodsky, Shvarts; Tarkovsky, Shemiakin, Sokurov; Silvestrov, Sebald.

Reading knowledge of Russian required. Graduate seminar; qualified undergraduates admitted with instructor's permission.

History 2275hf. Subjectivities and Identities in Russia and Eurasia: Seminar

Semester: 

N/A

Offered: 

2013
Year-long bi-weekly seminar on collective and personal identities in the history, culture, and politics of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Key questions: where and how are identities formed (in domestic, public, textual, and virtual spaces)? What factors constrain, promote, and shape identity formation? What theories of self-expression help us understand the region? How are identities and subjectivities similar? How are they different?

Note: Open to qualified...

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Slavic 98: Junior Tutorial

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013

I am teaching the second half of our tutorial for junior concentrators. This term, we are reading Evgenii Onegin across the whole semester.