Courses:
Autumn 2017
SLAVIC 261/361 Reading Leo Tolstoy in the Digital Age
A renowned novelist, Leo Tolstoy has been also known as a great philosopher of art who contributed to the world literature and culture with his innovative ideas of multi-perspectivism, relativism, “contagious” art, cinematic image, and literary montage. How did Tolstoy’s realist prose fiction give birth to such modernist conceptions of art? What can we learn from Tolstoy’s aesthetics today? How can we read Tolstoy’s prose fiction by means of digital humanities methods? This course is arranged as a series of digital labs and seminar discussions and utilizes a project-based learning approach. The output of the collaborative projects will include literary text mining in Python and RStudio, sentiment analysis in MALLET, creation of a character networks in gephi, and side-by-side visualization of different versions of Tolstoy’s texts in Beyond Compare.
 
Winter 2018
SLAVIC 229 Nikolai Gogol: Between Russian and Ukrainian Cultures
Nikolai Gogol’s national identity has been often discussed in terms of his vacillation between Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms. However, his literary legacy has not yet to be studied as the clash and competition of the two national literary traditions. In the course, we will identify the generic forms and poetics of the medieval Rus’ and Ukrainian baroque, as well as Russian classicist and sentimentalist traditions that shaped Gogol’s literary style. In addition to studying his poetics, we will apply post-structuralist and postcolonial literary theory to analyze Gogol’s idiosyncratic language and persona.
 
Spring 2018
SLAVIC 148/348 Soviet Literature and Culture after Stalin’s Death
The course offers a survey of Soviet and post-Soviet literary texts and films created by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian artists in 1953-2000s. We will trace the cultural tendencies in the context of political and social upheavals. For most of Soviet and post-Soviet cultural history, the best works written during this period occupied not the center of literary life, but its periphery or underground. The reading list for the course represents the most experimental part of Slavic literary canon. During the first half of the course we will focus on the topics of opposition and dissent, generational conflict, modernization, Soviet everyday life, gender, citizenship and national identity, state-published and samizdat literature, "village" and "cosmopolitan" culture, etc. The second part of it will be devoted to the postmodernist aesthetics and ideology in the dismantlement of totalitarian society, as well in the process of shaping post-Soviet identities. The reading materials range from the fictional, poetic, and publicistic works written by Noble-prize (Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Alexievich) and other major writers of the period to the drama, film, and popular culture.
 
SLAVIC 230 Eighteenth-Century Slavic Literature
This course offers a comprehensive survey of the main trends in the eighteenth-century Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian literature, language, and culture. Discussion topics include: normative aesthetics; generic imports and diversity; the development of the Russian literary language; discourses of imperial statehood in literary culture; the status of the writer, literary and political subjectivity; anthropological and philosophical ideas of “man” and “heart.”