The following courses offered in Term 2 of 2014 Winter Session currently still have space:
CENS 201: Ukraine in the Middle – Florian Gassner
The crisis that erupted in Ukraine in early 2014 is a devastating event in its own right, but it also expounds challenges faced by most of Eastern Europe today. This is evident, for example, in the recurring references to the cases of Kosovo and South Ossetia in the current political debate on Ukraine. Some of these challenges stem from the Soviet era and the downfall of the Soviet Union. Others date back many centuries, arguably even to Medieval Europe. The aim of this course is to investigate and analyze the historical and cultural factors that continue to cause social and political unrest in Eastern Europe. Our main evidence will be made up of literary texts, supplemented with film clips, non-fiction texts and documentaries. The instructor will also arrange for panel discussions with young people from Ukraine via Skype during class hours.
Register for CENS 201
GERM 313: Conversational German – Florian Gassner
This course provides students with a forum where they, as a group, learn to apply their knowledge of German in meaningful and creative ways. The curriculum builds on the vocabulary and grammatical structures introduced in our Beginner and Intermediate language offerings, and it is designed to help you use these in a variety of social configurations, from everyday communication to job interviews. A special focus lies on mastering phrases and idioms that recur frequently in formal and informal settings. To this end, we will engage in debates on current topics in German public discourse, such as multiculturalism, social policy, gender roles and education.
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GERM 325: German Translation I – Caroline Rieger
This seminar provides an introduction to theory and practice of translation and translation studies. Students will get hands-on experience with a variety of non-literary texts (administration, advertising, business, cartoons, conversations, jokes, journalism etc.) and literary texts (excerpts from film scripts, novels, plays, poems, short stories, youth and children’s novels etc.) and develop skills to translate these texts from German into English and (to a lesser degree) from English into German.
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RUSS 306A: Russian Literature in Translation – Katherine Bowers
Henry James famously called nineteenth-century Russian novels “loose and baggy monsters.” In this class, we will examine these creatures. From the century’s early novels experimenting with form, language, and effect to the later century’s works including Tolstoy’s great philosophical novel Anna Karenina and other authors’ reactions to it. Through discussions we will examine how the novel came to be, the tension between reality and realism, and why the ideas that crucially underpin these works continue to inspire today. The reading list includes Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Anna Karenina, and shorter novels by Chekhov and others.
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RUSS 412: Dostoevsky in Translation – Katherine Bowers
Although written in nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoevsky’s novels transcend their time and remain popular today, frequently appearing on lists of the “Top Novels of All Time.” Their frenetic characters burn to enact philosophical experiments, their intense narratives abound with brutal crimes, their grimy spaces give way to spiritual transfiguration, and they invite us to reconsider the nature of good and evil, the human condition, and modern life. In this course we will read a selection of them, from Dostoevsky’s earliest works to his final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. We will also watch some recent film adaptations of his novels, including The Idiot (Estonia, 2011) and The Double (United States, 2013). Along the way we will encounter paradoxes, madness, murder, and, ultimately, come to grapple with some of modernity’s greatest philosophical questions.
Register for RUSS 412
