2023-24 Literature and Culture Courses

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Fall 2023 Literature & Culture Courses

Gened 1059: Moral Inquiry in the Novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Professor Justin Weir            MW 12:00-1:15pm

Course site

Course description: How can the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky help us think differently about everyday moral dilemmas that are often seen as the prerogative of religion, politics, or philosophy? This course considers how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky take up moral inquiry in their fiction, introduces students to philosophical texts that informed their major fiction, and asks why the novel as a literary genre may be a good forum for the discussion of ethics. We will read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, as well as selected texts from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others.

Course notes: This course has an enrollment cap and is a part of the coordinated, ranked-choice Gen Ed lottery. To participate in the lottery, you must request permission to enroll and rank your choices through my.harvard by 11:59 p.m. EST Tuesday, August 29, 2023. The Gen Ed lottery will run Wednesday, August 30; if you are successful in the lottery, your course petition in your Crimson Cart will turn to a green check that allows you to enroll. For timely updates and detailed instructions about entering the Gen Ed lottery, please see https://gened.fas.harvard.edu/fall-2023 

FYSEMR 36G: The Creative Work of Translating (Stephanie Sandler)

FYSEMR36G: The Creative Work of Translating
Professor Stephanie Sandler            Th 9:45-11:45 am

 

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, film, and music. We will stretch our own imaginative capacities by transposing material across media and genres, creating homophonic translations, and translating between languages. We will work individually as well as collaboratively. We will read a small amount translation theory, and some reflections by working translators. We will invite into our classroom practicing poets and translators, attend readings and lectures at Harvard, visit the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Class notes: This course is open to First-Year Students only. The only requirement is some knowledge of a language besides English – and a readiness to play with languages, art forms, and texts. Readings likely from Polina Barskova, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Forrest Gander, Susan Howe, Yi Lei, Vladimir Nabokov, Sappho, Wang Wei, and Sor Juana; music by John Adams and David Grubbs. Films to include Despair, Drive My Car and The Golem

 

FYSEMR 63T: What is Avant-Garde? (Nariman Skakov)

FYSEMR63T: What is Avant-Garde?
Professor Nariman Skakov            W 3:45-5:45 pm

 

Avant-garde art sometimes seems to make a complete break from the art that precedes it. The very name, ‘avant-garde’ (from French, literally ‘advance guard’) carries military connotations that suggest a total, violent break with the past. Our seminar will look at another side of this radical change, asking whether the avant-garde might also be playful, rather than violent, making possible an interplay between invention and convention? And what is the afterlife of the avant-garde? How did its legacy inform aesthetic innovation in a later period? We will try to answer these questions by studying a small set of textual and visual artifacts from the long twentieth century, cutting across different continents and political formations. We will begin with conceptual experiments of the Dada and Suprematist groups and Italian and Russian Futurism and their convoluted relationship with Fascist and Communist ideologies. We contrast these historical examples with later work, like that of Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys. We will consider cinematic experiments of Dziga Vertov and Jean-Luc Godard, ending with David Lynch’s radical displacement of the reigning ideology of Hollywood in his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. This nearly century-long framework will allow us to investigate a range of artistic, social, and political mobilizations of the term ‘avant-garde’. We will be doing short readings and working through them together in class, helping students learn how to read theoretical texts as well as read novellas and watch films in the light of theory.

Class notes: There will be two required trips to the Bauhaus-related collection at the Harvard Art Museums and to the ICA, Boston.

 

Slavic 133: Modernist Journeys (Nariman Skakov)

Slavic 133: Modernist Journeys
Professor Nariman Skakov            M 3:00-5:00 pm

 

In the years following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union emerged as a major political power and underwent sweeping social changes. This course will explore the radical displacements that took place in this, the first socialist society—immigration, war, forced relocation, labor camps, and, in very rare cases, travel for leisure. In parallel with these sweeping movements of dislocation, this was the time when a modernist aesthetic tradition was flourishing and key precepts of the emerging Soviet identity were formed. Modernist Journeys explores accounts of travel, displacement, and migration as a window into the diversity of perspectives that contributed to the formation (or disintegration) of the new “Soviet man.” We will consider memoirs, travelogues, films, and theoretical texts by major Soviet authors and film-makers as they traveled to Mongolia, Central Asia, Armenia and China as well as Paris and “the West": Sergei Tretyakov, Osip Mandelstam, Isaak Babel’, Andrei Platonov, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dziga Vertov, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov among others.

 

 

Slavic 175: Between East and West: A Critical Mapping of Polish Culture (Aleksandra Kremer)

Slavic 196: Making Sense of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Professor Nariman Skakov            M 12:45-2:45 pm

 

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, caused a humanitarian catastrophe, reshaped the geopolitical landscape, and prompted a profound semantic crisis. Fueled by Putin’s manipulative rhetoric and the disinformation of propaganda, this crisis stimulated a rigorous aesthetic response that reclaims art’s right to meaning. This course aims to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the complex array of cultural practices that respond to the war. It explores works of Ukrainian cultural producers and some other dissenting voices from the region that resist the dehumanizing discourse of war by exploring new forms of aesthetic expression. Course materials in English translation will be discussed with their makers via zoom and will include a variety of media – cinema, literature, poetry, music, plastic and visual arts by Serhii Zhadan, Galina Krug, Ostap Slyvynsky, Nikita Kadan, Sergei Loznitsa, Luna, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Glukhovsky among others.

Slavic 191: Silent Film (Daria Khitrova)

Slavic 191: Silent Film
Professor Daria Khitrova            T 12:45-2:45 pm

 

Today, we take it for granted that motion pictures talk. For some thirty-plus years from cinema’s invention they did not—yet no contemporary complained the art of film was inarticulate. Did filmmakers and filmgoers that lived one hundred years ago perceive the silence of films as a hindrance, or, perhaps, as cinema’s advantage over other arts? Was cinema admired despite, or on the strength of having been mute? The aim of this course is to introduce students to what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Our general outline is chronological; we will discuss both national and international schools and trends of filmmaking. Within the general framework of film history, we will trace individual aspects of production (like lighting, acting, camera work, editing, etc.), and follow these evolve into a unique system of visuals to become known as silent film style.

 

*Linguistics 250: Old Church Slavonic (Michael Flier)

Linguistics 250: Old Church Slavonic
Professor Michael Flier            TTh 1:30-2:45 pm

 

History of the first Slavic literary language, its role in Slavic civilization; phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of Old Church Slavonic; reading from canonical texts.

 

Slavic 253: Pushkin (Daria Khitrova)

Slavic 253: Pushkin
Professor Daria Khitrova            Fr 12:45-2:45 pm

 

In this course we will focus on the works of Aleksander Pushkin (1799-1837). We will read a wide range of Pushkin's lyric poetry, longer poemy, dramatic works, and prose in the original Russian and discuss them as both literary facts, as Formalist critics would put it, and as reflections on Russian cultural, social, and political history. We will employ a range of approaches to Pushkin and discuss the major touchstones of Pushkin criticism. 

Class notes: Open to qualified undergraduates with permission of instructor. Reading knowledge of Russian is required.

 

*Slavic 287: Poetic Self-Creation in Twentieth-Century Russia (Stephanie Sandler)

Slavic 299B: Slavic Graduate Proseminar
Professor Justin Weir            F 3:00-5:00 pm

Introduction to graduate study in Slavic. Selected topics in literary analysis, history, theory, and professional development. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year to receive credit.

 

Class notes: Reading knowledge of Russian required.

*Slavic 299a: Graduate Student Proseminar (Justin Weir)

Slavic 299a: Slavic Graduate Proseminar
Professor Justin Weir            Meeting Time TBA

 

Introduction to graduate study in Slavic. Selected topics in literary analysis, history, theory, and professional development. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year to receive credit.

Class notes: Reading knowledge of Russian required.

 

Spring 2024 Literature and Culture Courses

GenEd 1057: Poetry Without Borders (Stephanie Sandler)

GenEd 1057: Poetry Without Borders

Professor Stephanie Sandler W 3:00-5:00PM

Course site

Why do poems and poets today boldly cross the borders of language, geography, form, and how are those border-crossings charged politically, ethically, and aesthetically?

Without borders, can there be poetry? The border of white paper surrounds printed poems; national boundaries keep cultural and linguistic traditions distinct; and aesthetic practice and its conventions create genres and demarcate poetry from music or dance or film. How poetry requires but also perversely challenges these limits will be the subject of this course. 

The course studies the cultural practice of poetry, with an emphasis on contemporary poetry. We will examine four kinds of borders – performative, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic. That yields four large topics: poetry in and about public places (how does poetry speak to public life, including political life? How does poetry address experiences of trauma and harm? What ethical challenges loom large in poetic practice?); poetry and translation (what happens when poems cross languages? how to read mixed-language or macaronic poems?); poetry, confinement, and migration (what happens when poets cross geographic borders? what do they hear in a new language and, as a result, in their own? how do mixed identities and allegiances work? how have the current crises around border crossings and around incarceration affected poetic practices?); and poetry and the other arts (how have the cross-influences of music, film, dance, the visual arts, and photography been felt in poetry? how do poems become visual artifacts, or scripts for performance?).  

We will read, listen to, and learn from Laurie Anderson, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Graham, Eliza Griswold, Susan Howe, Ilya Kaminsky, Daniil Kharms, Eugene Ostashevsky, Yang Lian, Valzhyna Mort, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tracy K. Smith, C. D. Wright, and others.

The course culminates in a final creative project, and it will also have an engaged learning component. Students will explore poetry outside the classroom and engage with communities beyond Harvard.

Class notes: This course has an enrollment cap and is a part of the coordinated, ranked-choice Gen Ed lottery. To participate in the lottery, you must first request permission to enroll and then rank your choices through my.harvard by 11:59 p.m. EST Wednesday, November 8, 2023. The Gen Ed lottery will run Thursday, November 9; if you are successful in the lottery, your course petition in your Crimson Cart will turn to a green check that allows you to enroll. For timely updates and detailed instructions about entering the Gen Ed lottery, please see https://gened.fas.harvard.edu/spring-2024-courses-and-lottery

Slavic 97: Introduction to Slavic Literatures and Cultures (Aleksandra Kremer)

Slavic 97: Introduction to Slavic Literatures and Cultures
Professor Aleksandra Kremer           T 12:45-2:45pm

 

An interdisciplinary introduction to major issues in the field of Slavic Languages and Literatures, including critical theory, modes of interpreting literary texts, the forces structuring national and regional identities, as well as major authors of the Slavic literary traditions, including Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, and Polish works.

Class notes:  This course is required for concentrators in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Other students are welcome and should contact the instructor before the start of the semester.

 

Slavic 121/TDM 121K: Ballet, Past and Present (Daria Khitrova)

Slavic 121: Ballet, Past and Present
Professor Daria Khitrova            TTh 1:30-2:45pm

 

This course explores the history of ballet, classical and beyond. We will view and discuss ballets to help us think about what ballet is, and why it has been such an enduring art form in different eras and cultures. Why is it mute and does it have to be? What kind of stories can it tell and how should we read them? How do ballets survive and how do they change in the process? Who makes a ballet: a choreographer or dancers? Or is it, perhaps, a composer, designer, or story writer? Does ballet technique confine the body, as the pioneers of modern dance used to assert, or is it a form of idealist philosophy, the ultimate expression of human freedom, as twentieth-century theorists of ballet have suggested? The works to be studied include Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Apollo, and others. The course is classroom-only (no dancing component; only watching, reading, and discussing) but, if pandemics permit, will also include a visit to the theater as well as to a ballet class and, possibly, rehearsals. No pre-requisites.

Class notes: Jointly offered as TDM 121K.

 

Slavic 147: Russian Fiction in the Soviet Era (Justin Weir)

Slavic 147: Russian Fiction in the Soviet Era
Professor Justin Weir            M 3:00-5:00pm

 

In this course we will read several of the most acclaimed works of Russian fiction in the Soviet era, including Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s, Doctor Zhivago, Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, as well as other stories and novels by Osip Mandelshtam, Yuri Olesha, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Evgeny Zamyatin. The main themes of the course will be the role of the author in a totalitarian society, politics, and the form of the novel in the twentieth century. No prerequisites. Conference course.

Class notes: Discussion sections W 3:00-5:00pm, TBA.

 

 

Slavic 171: The Holocaust in Polish Memory and Culture (Aleksandra Kremer)

Slavic 171: The Holocaust in Polish Memory and Culture
Professor Aleksandra Kremer            W 3:00-5:00pm

 

Hitler’s plan to destroy European Jewry was carried out by the Nazis mostly on the territory of occupied Poland, where three million Jews had lived before World War II. The Poles’ position has often been described as that of bystanders; nevertheless, Polish behavior also encompassed more direct involvement—whether complicity and murder, or attempts at rescuing Jews. How is this time remembered in Poland? How is it represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish literary texts? What is the relation between the Holocaust memory and Polish wartime history? What do we know about German and Soviet occupations of the country? How was the memory of the Holocaust and World War II shaped and used by communist Poland? What happens to this memory today? We will look for answers in different short stories, novels, poems, memoirs, and films created between the 1940s and the present day, and confront them with recent scholarship.

Class notes:  All readings in English. Students who wish to read Polish texts in the original may arrange a special section with the instructor.  Students who take this course are eligible to apply for the Slavic Department’s Jurzykowski grants for the summer language study in Poland.

 

*Slavic 262: Bakhtin (Nariman Skakov)

Slavic 262: Bakhtin
Professor Nariman Skakov           W 12:45-2:45pm

 

‘Quests for my own word are in fact quests for a word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself,’ writes Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) towards the end of his life. In this ceaseless pursuit of ‘another’ word, Bakhtin, one of the most distinguished literary critics of the twentieth century, helped reorient literary studies around ideas of unfinalizability, dialogic imagination, chronotope, and carnival. The seminar explores these core concepts through close reading, in English, of Bakhtin’s key texts, including Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, Rabelais and His World, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ‘Epic and Novel,’ ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,’ ‘Discourse in the Novel,’ as well as a consideration of his influence on later theorists.

Class notes:  All readings in English. Primarily for graduate students but open to qualified undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

 

*Slavic 280R: Medieval East Slavic (Michael Flier)

Slavic 280R: Medieval East Slavic
Professor Michael Flier            Th 9:45-11:45am

 

An exploration of the culture of medieval Rus', including art, architecture, ritual, music, literature, and history, from the ninth through the seventeenth centuries. 

 

 

Slavic 196: Making Sense of the Russo-Ukrainian War (Nariman Skakov)

Slavic 196: Making Sense of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Professor Nariman Skakov            M 12:45-2:45 pm

 

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, caused a humanitarian catastrophe, reshaped the geopolitical landscape, and prompted a profound semantic crisis. Fueled by Putin’s manipulative rhetoric and the disinformation of propaganda, this crisis stimulated a rigorous aesthetic response that reclaims art’s right to meaning. This course aims to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the complex array of cultural practices that respond to the war. It explores works of Ukrainian cultural producers and some other dissenting voices from the region that resist the dehumanizing discourse of war by exploring new forms of aesthetic expression. Course materials in English translation will be discussed with their makers via zoom and will include a variety of media – cinema, literature, poetry, music, plastic and visual arts by Serhii Zhadan, Galina Krug, Ostap Slyvynsky, Nikita Kadan, Sergei Loznitsa, Luna, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Glukhovsky among others.

Slavic 299B: Slavic Graduate Proseminar (Justin Weir)

Slavic 299B: Slavic Graduate Proseminar
Professor Justin Weir            F 3:00-5:00 pm

Introduction to graduate study in Slavic. Selected topics in literary analysis, history, theory, and professional development. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year to receive credit.

 

Class notes: Reading knowledge of Russian required.

Slavic 164: Literature of Catastrophe: Ukraine 1917-2022

Slavic 164: Literature of Catastrophe: Ukraine 1917-2022

Professor Tamara Hundorova              TTh 10:30-11:45am

Course site

The course offers an overview of Ukrainian literature through the prism of “catastrophic thinking” – a mode of representation of highly traumatic events of the twentieth century, such as the two World Wars, the October 1917 Revolution, the Holocaust, famines, and nuclear disasters. The aim of the course is to examine how trauma influences literary and cultural imagination and to consider the role of testimony, documentary, and aesthetic sublimation in artistic rendering of catastrophic events. Among the topics to be discussed are fiction and nonfiction as a means of representing catastrophe, the role of apocalyptic imagination, the transgenerational effect of trauma, etc.

Students will study representative texts of Ukrainian literature that cover key 20th-century catastrophic events - the Ukrainian Revolution, the Executed Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, Euromaidan, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Students will read and discuss texts by various Ukrainian authors from the early 20th century to the early 21st century.  The course has an intermedial emphasis: in addition to literary texts, we will also discuss films (Dovzhenko, Loznitsa, Chernobyl documentaries) and examples of Ukrainian art of the 20th century. Course does not require knowledge of the Ukrainian language and the texts will be read in English translation.

Class notes: Course will be taught by Visiting Professor Tamara Hundorova

Slavic 265: Readings in Ukrainian Literature and Culture

Slavic 265: Readings in Ukrainian Literature and Culture

Professor Tamara Hundorova        F 12:45-2:45pm

Course site

 

The seminar provides an understanding of the literary canon of Ukrainian literature from a gender perspective. It provides an analysis of the Ukrainian literary canon from a historical perspective (the 19th century to the early 21st century) and discusses the role of gender in its formation. Alternative canons, such as women's literature and literature of decolonization will be considered. Special attention will be given to the texts as a symbolic autobiography of the author.  The seminar will examine aspects related to authorship, representation of femininity and masculinity, and queer identity in different epochs and periods of Ukrainian literature, from Romanticism to postmodernism.  Students will read Taras Schevchenko, Marko Vovchok, Olha Kobylianska, Lesia Ukrainka, Oksana Zabuzhko, Valerian Pidmohylny, Yuriy Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, and others.

 

Course notes: Course will be taught by Visiting Professor Tamara Hundorova.

Czech 113: Advanced Czech II, Readings in Czech Literature and Culture

Czech 113: Advanced Czech II: Readings in Czech Literature and Culture

Professor Veronika Tuckerova.    MW 3:00-4:15 pm

Reading and discussion of modern Czech literature, including short stories, memoirs, essays, and graphic novels. Continued work on vocabulary expansion and composition, as well as translation practice. Readings from classic and contemporary authors, including Škvorecký, Vaculík, Havel, Hiršal and Grögerová, Jáchym Topol, Kaprálová, Olahová, Zmeškal, Lacková, Balabán, and others.

Prerequisites: Five semesters of Czech (Czech A, Czech B, and one semester of Czech Cr) or the equivalent.