How to Teach Contemporary Russian Culture?
SLAVIC 298
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
Our seminar will focus on a single question: how, after February 24, 2022, to teach undergraduates about Russian culture and about the issues it surfaces, including authoritarianism and freedom, exile and diaspora, public rhetoric and hidden resistance? We will develop conceptual frameworks for several kinds of undergraduate courses: first-year seminars; general education courses which might be comparative; introductory Slavic department courses: and Slavic department courses for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. We will read a range of texts, including recent work by Maria Stepanova, Linor Goralik, Sergei Lebedev, Vladimir Sorokin, Oksana Vasyakina, and discuss films by Sokurov, Zviagintsev, Loznitsa, and others. We will assess what works in translation, discuss strategies for choosing material, and practice assembling background mini-lectures that foster lively discussion among undergraduates. We will construct syllabi and modules, collectively and independently. Our aims will thus be largely pedagogical, but we will also seek to create a community in our own classroom that can generate new translations and new scholarship based on contemporary material.
Course Notes
Requires reading knowledge of Russian.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
