(Offered as SOCI 230 and ASLC 230.) East Asia has been booming, economically—first Japan, then Korea and Taiwan, and now China. In this course, we will study both what made the economic boom in these countries possible and what social issues have arisen in each country because of the particular social system that arose through its process of economic development. In particular, we will consider patterns of social inequality.
As a basis for understanding current global ecological crises, this course marries natural and social history as well as ecological and social science of the human society/environment nexus. We will study the anthropogenic drivers of environmental change in historical perspective. The new and greater scale of environmental degradation made possible by industrialization and the globalizing tendencies of the modern economic system will receive special attention as these continue to be central factors promoting ecological change.
Independent Reading Course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
The topic changes every year. Taught entirely in Russian. Two class meetings per week.
Fall semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.
A half course designed for advanced students of Russian who wish to develop their fluency, pronunciation, oral comprehension, and writing skills. Major attention will be given to reading, discussion and interpretation of current Russian journalistic literature. This course will cover several basic subjects, including the situation of the Russian media, domestic and international politics, culture, and everyday life in Russia. Two hours per week.
Requisite: RUSS 302 or consent of the instructor. Fall semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.
This course advances skills in reading, understanding, writing, and speaking Russian, with materials from twentieth-century culture. Readings include fiction by Chekhov, Babel, Olesha, Nabokov, and others. Conducted in Russian, with frequent writing and grammar assignments, in-class presentations, and occasional translation exercises. Two seminar-style meetings and one hour-long discussion section per week.
(Offered as RUSS 234 and FAMS 313.) With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the great utopian experiment of the 20th century–a radical attempt to reorganize society in accordance with rational principles–came to an end. This course explores the dramatic history of that experiment from the perspective of those whose lives were deeply affected by the social upheavals it brought about. We begin by examining the early visions of the new social order and attempts to restructure the living practices of the Soviet citizens by reshaping the concepts of time, spa
This course approaches pre-revolutionary Russian cultural history by attending to how key social actors have been represented. We will study the lives of tsar, saint, aristocrat, peasant, poet, intellectual, revolutionary, merchant and exile as represented in letters, memoirs, fiction, verse, painting and performance. Examples of life-writing will include seventeenth-century archpriest Avvakum’s “autobiography” (the first example of the genre in Russia), revolutionary Alexander Herzen’s My Life and Thoughts (alongs
An attentive reading of works spanning Nabokov’s entire career, both as a Russian and English (or “Amero-Russian”) author, including autobiographical and critical writings, as well as his fiction and poetry. Special attention will be given to Nabokov’s lifelong meditation on the elusiveness of experienced time and on writing’s role as a supplement to loss and absence.
