7 courses with the subject CLRS GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; A Gentle Creature) and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Family Happiness; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required
Poets, Rebels, Exiles examines the successive generations of the most provocative and influential Russian and Russian Jewish writers and artists who brought the cataclysm of the Soviet and post-Soviet century to North America. From Joseph Brodsky—the bad boy bard of Soviet Russia and a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, who served 18 months of hard labor near the North Pole for social parasitism before being exiled—to the most recent artistic descendants, this course will interrogate diaspora, memory, and nostalgia in the cultural production of immigrants and exiles
A study of Dostoevsky and Dickens as two writers whose engagement in the here and now was vital to their work and to their practice of the novel. Readings from Dostoevsky cluster in the 1870s and include two novels, Demons (1872) and The Adolescent (1876), and selections from his Diary of a Writer. Readings from Dickens span his career and include, in addition to David Copperfield (1850), sketches and later essays.
An introduction to central concepts in narrative theory: plot, archetype, myth, story vs. discourse, Freudian analysis, history and narrative, chronotype and personal narrative. These are explored in the context of sustained investigation of a particular plot device: the time loop. Examples come from Russian modernist fiction, Soviet and American science fiction, and film. We compare being stuck in a time loop with being lost in space - a theme found in personal narratives shared orally and online, as well as in literary fiction. Students develop a final paper topic on time loop narrative of their choice
The late nineteenth-century culture of “decadence” marks the moment when European literature and art decisively turn to the dark side. Decadence loves to depict depravity and deviant behavior; it revels in sensuality, eroticism, libertinism, and immoralism; the aesthetics of madness and intoxication abound. In this course we will explore how these decadent tendencies shaped the elegant and transgressive literary culture of Russia’s pre-revolutionary Silver Age. The decadent predilection for self-destructive behavior and the pervasive sense of impending doom took on new meaning within the Russian cultural context, on the eve of the communist revolution. We will first survey the defining figures of European decadence: from Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and the “accursed” French poets, to the radical lifestyle experiments of Huysmans and the bondage games of Sacher-Masoch. Considerable attention will also be devoted to the enormous influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy—his iconic conceptions of Dionysian ecstasy, the Übermensch, and “beyond good and evil.” In turn, our study of decadence in Russia will range from symbolist poets, chasing their ethereal “mysterious woman,” to major modernist novels: murder and madness in Sologub’s The Little Demon; Artsybashev’s sexually scandalous Sanin; Andrei Bely’s revolutionary masterpiece, Petersburg. Along the way, we will also focus on issues such as: symbolist theories of art and a new flowering of metaphysical philosophy in Russia new attitudes toward sexuality, new theories of desire and the unconscious the intellectual collaboration between literature and visual art the coming of revolution and terrorist violence, as seen through the prism of decadence
The Cold War epoch saw broad transformations in science, technology, and politics. At their nexus a new knowledge was proclaimed, cybernetics, a putative universal science of communication and control. It has disappeared so completely that most have forgotten that it ever existed. Its failure seems complete and final. Yet in another sense, cybernetics was so powerful and successful that the concepts, habits, and institutions born with it have become intrinsic parts of our world and how we make sense of it. Key cybernetic concepts of information, system, and feedback are now fundamental to our basic ways of understanding the mind, brain and computer, of grasping the economy and ecology, and finally of imagining the nature of human life itself. This course will trace the echoes of the cybernetic explosion from the wake of World War II to the onset of Silicon Valley euphoria
Before Marxism was an academic theory, it was a political movement, but it was not led by Marx. This course examines the years in between, when a new generation began the task of building the organizations, practices, and animating theories that came to define “Marxism” for the twentieth century. Two of the most important such organizations were the German and Russian Social Democratic Parties. Responding to dramatically different contexts, and coming to equally different ends, they nevertheless developed organically interconnected. This course selects key episodes from the road to power of both parties, from their founding to the Russian Revolution— what might be called the “Golden Age” of Marxism. This course is open to all undergraduates who have completed Contemporary Civilization
Source: Barnard College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
