6 courses with the subject CLSL 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.
This class offers an introduction to Hebrew culture from a historical and literary perspective, focusing on the intersection of linguistic ideology, and literary and cultural creativity. What, we will ask, is the relationship between what people think about Hebrew and what they write in Hebrew? We will investigate the manners in which Hebrew was imagined – as the language of God, the language of the Jews, the language of the patriarchy, the language of secularism, the language of Messianism, the language of nationalism, a dead language, a diasporic Eastern European language, a local Middle Eastern Language, ext., and how these conflicting imaginaries informed Hebrew creativity. This class does not require prior knowledge of Hebrew. Students proficient in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, and/or European languages are encouraged to contact the instructor in advance for supplementary material in these languages
This seminar course will provide a punctual survey of trends and figures in the experimental cultures of East Central Europe. Formations include the avant-gardes (first, postwar, and postcommunist); experimental Modernisms and Postmodernisms; alternative film, media, and visual culture; and formally inventive responses to exceptional historical circumstances. Proceeding roughly chronologically from early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, we will examine expressionist/surrealistic painting and drama; zenithist hybrid genres such as cinépoetry and proto-conceptualist writing; mixed-media relief sculpture; post-conceptual art; experimental and animated film; and avant-garde classical music. In terms of theory, we will draw on regional and global approaches to artistic experimentation ranging from Marxist and other theories of value through discourses of the body and sexuality in culture to contemporary affect theory. The course will be taught in English with material drawn primarily from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Each session will include a lecture followed by discussion
CLSL GU4012Holocaust Literature: Critical Thinking in Dark Times3.00
How do you write literature in the midst of catastrophe? To whom do you write if you don’t know whether your readership will survive? Or that you yourself will survive? How do you theorize society when the social fabric is tearing apart? How do you develop a concept of human rights at a time when mass extermination is deemed legal? How do you write Jewish history when Jewish future seems uncertain? This course offers a survey of the literature and intellectual history written during World War II (1939-1945) both in Nazi occupied Europe and in the free world, written primarily, but not exclusively, by Jews. We will read novels, poems, science fiction, historical fiction, legal theory and social theory and explore how intellectuals around the world responded to the extermination of European Jewry as it happened and how they changed their understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual, what it means to be Jewish, and what it means to be human. The aim of the course is threefold. First, it offers a survey of the Jewish experience during WWII, in France, Russia, Poland, Latvia, Romania, Greece, Palestine, Morocco, Iraq, the USSR, Argentina, and the United States. Second, it introduces some of the major contemporary debates in holocaust studies. Finally, it provides a space for a methodological reflection on how literary analysis, cultural studies, and historical research intersect
This course researches the potentiality and development of a Socialist World Literature. Students will learn about the more contemporary constructions of World Literature in the West, and then look at how the Soviet Union and its satellites potentially crafted an alternative to the contemporary construction. The class will then examine whether the Soviet version addressed some of the criticism of the contemporary definitions of World Literature, particularly through addressing the colonialism and nationalism. Students will learn about the complex history of World Literature and its definitions, reading the major theorists of the concept as well as the major critics. They will also create their own arguments about World Literature in a highly-scaffolded major project due at the end of the term. All readings will be provided online
Central Europe is home to large number of authors, artists, and directors who made use of the critical power of the grotesque. Beginning from the fin-de-siecle and moving to the contemporary moment, students will get to know a wide range of grotesque art from Central Europe as well as several of the critical approaches to the subject. The course should be of interest to anyone studying Central European culture, as well as students interested in cultural studies more generally. Students will learn to identify and analyze examples of the grotesque through a variety of theoretical lenses. They will also enrich their knowledge of Central European literature and culture
The course will discuss how filmmaking has been used as an instrument of power and imperial domination in the Soviet Union as well as on post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors which exemplify the function of filmmaking as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of postcolonial theories. The course will focus both on Russian cinema and often overlooked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a «new historic community of the Soviet people» as well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and increasingly assertive ways their own counter-narratives. Close attention will be paid to the new Russian film as it re-invents itself within the post-Soviet imperial momentum projected on the former Soviet colonies
