School of Russian Graduate Course Listings 2002-2007
2007:
RU 6502 Advanced Conversation Practicum
Natalia Viktorovna Bogdanova
Students in this class will focus on expanding their lexicon and their syntactical repertoire in scholarly and journalistic speech and on preparing scholarly presentations in their area of interest. Main themes will be political, economic, cultural, and social life in Russia as they approach interesting and sometimes controversial topics concerning contemporary Russian society and culture. Students will read and discuss assigned articles on Russian politics, society, and culture, and will write compositions. Students will be required to discern and analyze the author’s point of view and then formulate their own opinion. Grades will be determined according to participation in class discussions, weekly compositions, an oral presentation, and a final oral examination. Textbook: I. A. Starovoitova, Vashe mnenie (Moscow, 2006).
RU 6506 Advanced Grammar
Natalia Viktorovna Bogdanova
This course is intended for students who want to have a thorough knowledge of Russian grammar. Attention will be paid mainly to those themes which usually proved to be the most difficult for students of Russian as a foreign language: meanings and uses of cases, productive and non-productive types of Russian verbs, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, the use of pronouns and the meanings and uses of conjunctions and conjunctive words in compound and complex sentences. Reading and analysis of novels and newspaper articles, as well as assigned grammar exercises and essays, will help students use correct grammar forms and constructions automatically. The final exam has three parts: grammar test, writing, and use of Russian. Textbooks: Pulkina, Zakhava-Nekrasova. Russian. A Practical Grammar with Exercises. Moscow, 1994; Andrews, Averianova, Piadusova, Russkii glagol: Formy i funktsii, Moscow, 2003; and others.
RU 6516 Russian Verbal Aspect
Aleksei Dmitrievich Shmelev
This course will focus on one of the most challenging issues of Russian grammar: verbal aspect. We will discuss not only the use of perfective and imperfective aspect, but also the aspectual system as a whole including such facets as meaning of aspects, aspectual derivation, aspectual pairedness, aspectual triplets, verbs of motion as a subsystem of Russian verbs, manners of verbal action, aspect in dictionaries, etc. Students will work through exercises and read short works of prose (fiction and non-fiction) for analysis; we will use several workbooks and language manuals published in Russia, as well as a coursepack of selected readings. Students’ grades will be based on three written exams, daily reading and writing homework, and class participation.
RU 6511 Readings in the Contemporary Russian Press Svetlana Borisovna Stepanova
This course will focus on the development of vocabulary related to Russian media, and of reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills through reading, viewing, and discussion of various materials in the journalistic and popular press. We will discuss the political, economic, social, and cultural life of Russia as represented in the media. At home students will read assigned press materials and do grammatical and lexical exercises to develop vocabulary. In class we will watch television programs thematically linked with the assigned readings. Students will be required to convey the author’s opinion and their own, to participate in debates, and to give and respond to oral reports. Grades will be assessed according to class participation, homework, an oral report, weekly compositions, and a final examination.
RU 6632 Russian Culture through Language
Aleksei Dmitrievich Shmelev
This course will focus on helping students toward a better understanding of Russian culture through the tool of Russian lexicon. We will discuss words that reflect and convey Russian modes of thought – things that native speakers take for granted, since the worldview encoded in these words is usually presented in non-assertive components of meaning (that is, connotations, presuppositions, etc.). However, most of those words are language-specific and defy translation; when translated directly or naively into other languages, they may cause cross-cultural miscommunication. Students will write short essays two-three times a week discussing various aspects of Russian culture as it may be understood through its key-words. Grades will be based on class participation and essays.
RU 6631 Second Language Teaching Methodology
Maria Alekseevna Shardakova
This course acquaints students with current theories, models, and practices employed in the field of second/foreign language acquisition while briefly surveying the history of approaches to second/foreign language teaching. Students will also examine major issues in second language classroom research. Students will engage in an on-going discussion about objectives and standards for foreign language teaching, including the national standards, Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century, and the Proficiency Guidelines of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), types of instruction (i.e., contextualized language instruction, content-based and content-enriched instruction, etc.), learning styles and strategies, individual learner variables (i.e., aptitude, motivation, proficiency, affective filter, etc.), the role of technology in foreign language teaching, assessment of teaching/learning, and so forth. Students will develop techniques for teaching and testing foreign language skills, curriculum development, lesson planning, and material selection. They will also have practical experience through mini-teaching situations. Course required for DML candidates.
RU 6715 Eugene Onegin and the Culture of Its Time
Oleg Anatolievich Proskurin
The course is designed as a close reading of the most acclaimed of Pushkin’s works – his novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823-1831). The novel was written and published in separate chapters over several years, and readers remained in suspense as they did not know what would happen next with its heroes. Students will be repeating the story of the first Pushkin’s readers over six weeks. Pushkin’s work is an encyclopedia of Russian culture of the first thirty years of the 19th century. Thus the course will be interdisciplinary: students will read simultaneously poems written by Pushkin and his contemporaries, and will listen to the music, ballets, and operas that Pushkin’s heroes were watching. We will examine theater programs as well as a design of a country estate in Pushkin’s time. Students will study aristocratic salon culture, the role of duels, and restaurant menus in both capital cities and the countryside. The course also includes video materials from Peter Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin and one contemporary movie based on Pushkin’s plot. Students will write three short response papers and a final exam.
RU 6630 Russian Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Arts Maria Alekseevna Shardakova
This course acquaints students with one of the most fascinating periods in Russian culture that best represents the interconnectedness of various artistic forms, such as literature, music, dance, painting, décor, architecture, theater, and film. Students will explore central issues of the period, such as the relationship between art and revolution, reconceptualizations of society, history and the self. Of particular interest will be artists’ and authors’ experimentation in form and language in order to present afresh the experience of life. Employing theoretical frameworks of semiotics, formalist literary critique, constructivism, and communication theory, students will examine how modernist artists dismiss traditional referential meaning in creating new types of signification, how they construct communicative relationships with their readers, and what social implications arise from these practices. Principal artistic movements examined will include symbolism, decadence, the avant-garde, including neo-primitivism, cubo-futurism, constructivism, suprematism, and rayonism. Students will explore music of Skriabin, Stravinsky, Avraamov, Prokofiev, Matushin, Roslavets, and Mosolov; they will read short prose by Bunin, Brusov, Sologub, Kuprin, Leonid Andreev, Garshin, Remizov, Pilniak, Babel, Platonov, Zamiatin, and Kharms.
RU 6634 Contemporary Russian Literature
Oleg Anatolievich Proskurin
This course is designed to acquaint students with developments in Russian literature over the past decade. The emphasis will be on comprehension of the texts by representatives of different trends in (post)modern Russian literature (Victor Pelevin, Tatiana Tolstaya, Vladimir Sorokin, Boris Akunin, Mikhail Shishkin), as well as the most interesting currents in Russian poetry after Brodsky (Sergei Gandlevsky, Timur Kibirov, Vera Pavlova, and the ‘Babylon’ group). Special attention will be paid to the rise of a new generation of writers (‘Web-literature’). Students will write three short response papers and a final exam.
RU 6655 Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Revolutionary History vs. Revolutionary Culture
Aleksandr Petrovich Logunov
This course, a continuation of last year’s course on Nineteenth-Century Russian History, will examine the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the culture of this period – in effect, the opposition of revolutionary history and revolutionary culture. The beginning of the twentieth century went at an extremely rapid tempo and was characterized by social dynamics of a new kind. Three revolutions, the Russo-Japanese and World Wars, deep conflicts and reforms - all these events have changed Russia and indeed the entire world. At the same time this was the “Silver Age” of Russian culture, characterized by flourishing aesthetic searching and the development of new principles in social communications. The purpose of the course is to analyze the history of early twentieth-century Russia through the interaction of literature, culture, and art of the revolutionary process. In this course students will acquire new concepts and terms describing the social, political, and cultural realms.
RU 6646 Terrorism and Reaction in the Contemporary World Aleksandr Petrovich Logunov
Threats of terrorism have become part of everyday social, political, and cultural life; they have become the subject of heated discussions aimed at grasping the main reasons for this phenomenon and seeking ways to overcome it. This course will broadly analyze the history of terrorism as a system of global challengers to civilization. The course argues for the efforts of many countries to overcome terrorist threats; it also considers the influence of terroristic challengers on modern life. Systems of social and political concepts, as well as terms and methods to describe and represent modern social and political realms, will be acquired in this course.
RU 6635 Search for National Identity in Russian/Soviet Cinema
Galina Gennadievna Aksenova
The course will investigate the creation, development, and changes in the idea of national identity during the last 100 years in the cinema of Russia and the Soviet Union. Students will watch and analyze films produced during World Wars I and II, when nationalistic ideas were openly expressed, as well as films made after the October Revolution, during Stalin’s Cultural Revolution, the Thaw and Perestroika and in Putin’s Russia of today, when images of Mother-Soviet Russia and Mother-Russia were restructured in the search for national identity. Students will compare films on the same subject from different historical periods and will examine the rewriting of the past in Russia and in the Soviet Union. The focus of attention will be paid to recent films, from Pavel Lungin’s Taxi-Blues (1990) and Luna-Park (1992) to Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch 1 and 2 (2004, 2006). (1 Unit)
2006:
RU 6502: Advanced Conversation (Stepanova)
RU 6506: Advanced Grammar (Troufanova)
RU 6507: Advanced Syntax (Shmelev)
RU 6515: Advanced Composition and Stylistics (Shmelev)
RU 6617: Language of the Arts (Troufanova)
RU 6641 The Myth of Revolution in Russian Literature 1918-28 (Vinitsky)
RU 6615 Poets and Politics: from Pushkin to Brodsky (Proskurin)
RU 6658 Russian Drama of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Aksenova)
RU 6765 Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Vinitsky)
RU 6638 Nineteenth-Century Russian History (Logunov)
RU 6642 Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Three Faces of Russian Democracy (Logunov)
2005:
RU 6506: Advanced Grammar (Shmeleva)
RU 6511: Readings in the Contemporary Russian Press (Stepanova)
RU 6614: New Trends in Russian (Shmeleva)
RU 6616 Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture (Vinitsky)
RU 6764 Anton Chekhov (Vinitsky)
RU 6657 Geography of Russia and Central Eurasia (Medvedkova)
RU 6700 The Modernization of Russia: from Empire to Nation State (Medvedkova)
RU 6668 The Russian Television Mini-Series (Aksenova)
2004:
RU 6502: Advanced Conversation (Stepanova)
RU 6506: Advanced Grammar (Troufanova)
RU 6515: Advanced Composition and Stylistics (Troufanova)
RU 6634: Contemporary Russian Literature (Proskurina)
RU 6763: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Proskurina)
RU 6659: Stalin’s Socialist Realism in Cinema (Aksenova)
RU 6647: Problems in Contemporary Russia: the Mafia and Chechnya (Logunov)
RU 6751: Russian Economic Culture (Logunov)
2003:
RU 6506: Advanced Grammar (Troufanova)
RU 6507: Advanced Syntax (Troufanova)
RU 6645: Russian History, 1991 – Present (Logunov)
RU 6845: The Image of Peter the Great and Petersburg (Logunov)
RU 6643: Mythologies of Sexuality in Russian Modernism (Shevelenko)
RU 6884: Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (Vinitsky)
RU 6768: Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Vinitsky)
RU 6640: Three Directors: Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov (Aksenova)
2002:
RU 6506: Advanced Grammar (Zhuravlyova)
RU 6511: Readings in the Contemporary Russian Press (Zhuralyova)
RU 6514: Practical Phonetics (Stepanova)
RU 6606: Russian Word Formation (Zemskaya)
RU 6614: New Trends in Russian (Zemskaya)
RU 6672: Axmatova (Vinitsky)
RU 6762: Gogol’s Dead Souls (Vinitsky)
RU 6633: Religions of Russia (Tendriakova)
RU 6732: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Tendriakova)
RU 6637: Russian History since 1917 (Logunov)
RU 6755: Russian Historical Psychology (Logunov)
RU 6656: Women in Russian Cinema (Aksenova)