Current and Past Courses
Comparative LiteratureSurvey of Western Literature
ANCIENT TO MODERN Comparative study of major works of literature, philosophy and culture in the 'Western' tradition from the ancient world to the Renaissance, from Homer and the Bible to Shakespeare and Cervantes. Emphasis on the works as representative of their historical and cultural period, as well as how these works continue to shape the culture we live in today. Survey of Western Literature
THE MODERN PERIOD Comparative study of major works of literature, philosophy and culture in the Western tradition from the Enlightenment to today, from Descartes and Austen to Dickinson and Calvino. Emphasis on literary and artistic works as representative of their historical and cultural periods, as well as on how these works have shaped the world we live in today. Introduction to Comparative Literature
HYSTERICAL WOMEN & PARANOID MEN This course is an introduction to the theories, methods, and practices of the discipline of comparative literature. In this course we will explore a broad range of texts—novels, short stories, and films—assembled from a variety of traditions (British, American, Russian, German, and French), teasing out common themes and questions. The syllabus is divided into two parts: the first half addresses the question of female subjectivity, her relationship to language and power, her place in the patriarchal economy of which she both is and is not a part. The second part of the course focuses on male subjectivity, anxiety, and paranoia. LITERATURE AND IDEAS
This course offers students an introduction to the major ideas, problems, and critical trends that have shaped literary and cultural studies for the past 200 years. The syllabus is divided between readings in modern critical theory (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Beauvoir; Russian Formalism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, etc.) and studies in the novel: Lev Tolstoy's 1878 Anna Karenina. |
Russian Literature
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Russian & Soviet FilmINTRODUCTION TO RUSSIAN AND SOVIET FILM
This course focuses on the cinema and culture of twentieth-century Russia, beginning with the 1917 Russian Revolution and ending shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The class will center on representative films of the Soviet era, moving from the experimental cinema of the Russian avant-garde to the industrial daydreams of the socialist realists to the dissipated visions of the post-Soviet post-modernists. Russian and East European Cinemas
THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE This course focuses on the Golden Age of Soviet cinema: the period 1924-1929 during which Soviet filmmakers produced some of the greatest films in the history of the cinema. Sergei Eisenstein, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Esfir Shub and Dziga Vertov (among others) became known the world over for their radically innovative approaches to cinematography and montage. Their films were revolutionary both in form and content and reflected the period of radical social and political transformation that followed the 1917 Soviet Revolution. Russian and East European Cinemas
THE SOVIET NEW WAVE This course focuses on the Soviet New Wave: the period 1956-1968 during which Soviet filmmakers produced, for the second time, some of the greatest films in the history of the cinema. Kira Muratova, Sergei Parajanov, Andrei Tarkovsky – along with brilliant cameramen (and one camerawoman), German Lavrov, Margarita Pilikhina, Sergei Urusevsky – became known the world over for their radically innovative approaches to cinematography and montage. Their films were revolutionary both in form and content and reflected the period of social and political transformation that followed the death of Stalin in 1953. |
Film History & TheoryFILM THEORY
This graduate seminar provides an advanced introduction to the by-now substantial field of film theory. Equal attention will be given to the classic texts of early and contemporary film theory. We will read the discipline’s founding texts (Munsterberg, Balazc, Eisenstein, Kracauer, Benjamin, Bazin) and contemporary theory (Baudry, Metz, Mulvey, Heath, Williams, Doane, Deleuze, Marks). In our discussion we will rely on broader categories of subjectivity, spectatorship, and ideology to expand these theoretical parameters. We will screen films in conjunction with the readings in order to develop a common cinematic vocabulary for speaking about film theory. Historiography of Cinema
FILM SOUND This graduate course focuses on the history of cinema’s transition to sound, the ways in which this history is written, and the multiple directions for approaching such a history: perspectives on national and international development; economic, political, and ideological forces; technology, aesthetics, and questions of genre. FREUD & HITCHCOCK
A close study of the writings of Sigmund Freud together with the films of Alfred Hitchcock, beginning with the 1895 volume, Studies on Hysteria. Emphasis will be placed on Freud’s methodological contributions to the development of Western thought, on psychoanalysis as a critical and theoretical apparatus, and on Freud’s value for literary an cultural studies. Examples of the elaboration or application of Freudian methodology will include works by Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Peter Brooks, Kaja Silverman, and Slavoj Zizek. These theorists will help us to pose the question: what is a “Freudian” reading? |
Special Topics Courses
Lilya Kaganovsky and Julie Turnock
WOMEN’S CINEMA A graduate seminar examining women’s cinema from the silent to the contemporary era, across international perspectives. We define women and women’s cinema broadly and inclusively, examining works made by women filmmakers and for women spectators. |
Lilya Kaganovsky and Kristin Romberg
AESTHETIC TECHNOLOGIES OF THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE This course takes as its primary focus the radical transformations of aesthetic technologies in painting, photography, film, literature, poetry, and related media produced by the Russian avant-garde in the period from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the beginning of the Second World War. During these interwar years in Russia, Soviet artists attempted to participate directly through industrial design, architecture, literature, and cinema in the state’s ambitious projects for constructing a socialist modernity. Topics will include: “trans-sense” (zaum), estrangement (ostranenie), montage, collage, attraction, factography, mastery or conquest of space through vision (osvoenie), and socialist realism. We are interested in how these aesthetic technologies were employed in new media such as photography, cinema, and radio, as well as in how they were deployed across media more broadly, including more traditional arts like literature and painting. |
Lilya Kaganovsky and Michael Rothberg
DOCUMENTARY AESTHETICS: HISTORY, MEMORY, TRAUMA Co-taught graduate seminar focusing on non-fiction cinematic works that depict and reflect on key moments in twentieth-century history. This course looks at works that thematize memory, trauma, testimony, and forgetting and engages with some of the most extreme events of the last century, including World War II, the Holocaust, and the Leningrad Blockade as well as the formation and deformation of the Soviet and Nazi states and the upheavals of the 1960s. Drawing on experiments with documentary form by American, French, German, Israeli, and Soviet/post-Soviet filmmakers, we pursue questions of referentiality, aesthetics, and archiving and inquire into the politics of non-fiction representation. |