(Offered as RUSS 245, ARHA 245 and EUST 255.) The interchange between art and politics has long been a focal point of Russian cultural production. This course will survey the dynamic relationship between aesthetic innovation and political transformation in Russia from 1860 to the present. In doing so, it will cultivate appreciation of a wide range of artistic achievements originating in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Among the many paradoxes Dostoevsky presents is the paradox of his own achievement. Perceived as the most “Russian” of Russian writers, he finds many enthusiastic readers in the West. A nineteenth-century author, urgently engaged in the debates of his time, his work remains relevant today. The most influential theorists of the novel feel called upon to account for the Dostoevsky phenomenon. How can we understand Dostoevsky’s appeal to so many audiences?
A course that examines the stories and novels of rebels, deviants, dissidents, loners, and losers in some of the weirdest fictions in Russian literature.
This course stresses vocabulary building and continued development of speaking and listening skills. Active command of Russian grammar is steadily increased. Readings from authentic materials in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Brief composition assignments. Five meetings per week, including a conversation hour and a drill session.
Requisite: RUSS 102 or the equivalent. This will ordinarily be the appropriate course placement for students with two to three years of high school Russian. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Ciepiela.
Introduction to the contemporary Russian language, presenting the fundamentals of Russian grammar and syntax. The course helps the student make balanced progress in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural competence. Five meetings per week.
Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.
Independent Reading Course. Reading in an area selected by the student and approved in advance by a member of the Department.
Fall and spring semester. The Department.
(Offered as HIST 319 [c], ASLC 320 [WA] and RELI 322.) Conceptions of the religious and the secular that continue to resonate today assumed global significance in the course of the nineteenth century as colonial empires and nascent nation-states negotiated how they would govern heterogeneous populations and interact with each other.
This course explores the culture and history of the ancient Israelites through a close examination of the Hebrew Bible in its wider ancient Near Eastern context. A master-work of great complexity revealing many voices and many periods, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament is a collection of traditional literature of various genres including prose and poetry, law, narrative, ritual texts, sayings, and other forms.
Contemporary attention to fundamentalist or conservative religious movements on the one hand and the rejection of all religion on the other has sometimes obscured the influential role in the United States, past and present, of liberal religion. Religious institutions with marked liberal tendencies (most obviously “mainline” Protestantism) may be in numerical decline, but the influence of liberal attitudes toward religion arguably remains very much alive and well in American culture generally and formative in the lives of many communities and individuals.
The Qurʾan, according to the majority of Muslims, is God’s word revealed to Muhammad through angel Gabriel over a period of 22 years (610-632 CE). This course will introduce students to Islam’s scriptural text: its content, form, structure, and history. It will also examine the Qurʾan as a seventh-century product and as a text with a long reception-history among Muslims, exploring how it influenced to varying degrees the formulation of salvation history, law and legal theory, theology, ritual, intellectual trends, art and popular culture, and modernization.
