DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

In Winter Quarter of Second Year Polish, the students expand their speaking, reading and writing skills by building on grammar and vocabulary. As a complement to the linguistic side of the course, the students will gain a greater familiarity with Polish history and culture through varied means including readings of literary works, articles from contemporary Polish newspapers and movies.

Welcome to continuing Elementary Russian! This is the second part in a three-quarter sequence designed to introduce students to the Russian language and contemporary Russian culture. Students will continue to develop the fundamentals of speaking, listening, writing, and reading through a variety of communicative and content-based activities. Emphasis will be placed on practical communication so that students should be able to function at a basic level in authentic situations by the end of the year.

While focusing on conversation, this year-long course promotes the development of all language skills-- speaking, reading, writing, and listening--through a variety of communicative and content-based activities. The goal is to help students to master all of the major structures of Russian and to begin to function in a wide range of settings over a wide range of topics. Beyond assigned topics and themes, students will be encouraged to pursue and develop their own interests in Russian contemporary culture.

(Co-listed with CLS 202-0-22)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was, among other things, a grand experiment in family, sex and marriage.  How did the backwards Russia of the early twentieth century become the most advanced nation in the world in gender and family legislation by the 1920's?  How did Soviet government attempt to translate Marxist theories of the “woman question” into social practice?  What happened when revolutionary visions were replaced by the "Utopia in Power" of Joseph Stalin?  What becomes of utopian dreams in first a post-utopian and then a post-Soviet reality?  How did the state regulate gender representation in the arts?  And how did literature and the arts shape, resist or reflect key transformations in Soviet society as the century progressed?  We will examine both state-sanctioned and oppositional works, including poetry, short stories, novellas, novels, memoirs, film, and the visual arts as we explore these questions.

Poetry in Russian culture is a powerful and unique catalyst. This course offers a survey of the main trends in 19th Century Russian poetry, which, at the time, became a national symbol through the works of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Lermontov, Tiutchev, and others. Although the topics of this so-called Golden Age of Russian literature were many, particular emphasis was on the genre of elegy.

The Czech New Wave was one of the most fertile and original periods in Central European cinematography.  In the 1960s a young generation of directors captured the imagination of audiences and critics at home and abroad. The New Wave encompassed a variety of revolutionary styles that have made their way into the repertoire of directors around the world.  Produced under a reforming but still repressive regime, the films elegantly pushed the boundaries of the permissible by subtly weaving their messages into dramas of daily life and romantic love. Over time the directors, and the new generation of actors who worked with them, ventured into politically more accented topics like critisism of social realism and the consequences of communist policies for ordinary people.

The Wave filmmakers included Věra Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Jaromil Jireš, and, the most famous of the group, Miloš Forman, who fled communsit Czechoslovakia to become of the leading directors in Hollywood. Two New Wave productions garnered the Academy Award Oscar for Best Foreign Film (Shop on Main Street and Closely Watched Trains).  Others were locked away by Communist censors after the Soviet invasion of August 1968 and had to wait 20 years until the 1989 Velvet Revolution for their first screenings. 

A graduate level seminar that addresses the complexities of teaching Russian language. The group explores teaching methods with an emphasis on communicative approach to language teaching, working with groups and individuals, and demonstrating and presenting ideas. This seminar is geared toward the student interested in teaching assistantships as well as professional education.