Slavic Languages & Literatures
- Congratulations to Professor Harriet Murav, who was awarded the 2024 Heldt Prize for best book introducing new, innovative, and/or underrepresented perspectives into any area of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies for her book, As The Dust of the Earth: The Literature of... Read full story Murav Wins Heldt Book Prize
Events
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- Emeritus Professor Michael Finke has published Flights in the Cahier Series of Sylph Editions, which publishes "new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities."...
- Congratulations to Professor Valeria Sobol, who was awarded a BRIDGE grant from the U of I for a collaborative project with the University of Birmingham entitled "Russophone Literary Diversity and Peripheries." Her co-PI...
- The publication of Slavic Department Head David Cooper's The Czech Manuscripts was celebrated by the University of Illinois with a front-page story by Jodi Heckel on December 12. The full story can be found...
UKR 498: Problems in Ukrainian Literature
The course focuses on major works in Ukrainian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emphasizing its multi-national and multi-cultural dimensions. Among the authors included in the readings are Lesia Ukrainka, Olha Kobylianska, Pavlo Tychyna, Mykola Khvyliovyi, Isaac Babel, Leib Kvitko, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko, and Askold Melnychuk. Contemporary war literature in Ukraine is one of the major topics. The main theoretical concepts of the course include modernism, socialist realism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, decolonization, identity, and trauma. No knowledge of Ukrainian required. All readings available in English.
RUSS 219 Soviet/Russian Film: Propaganda and Otherness
The course focuses on propaganda and cinematic representation of the Other (regarding race, class, and gender) in Soviet and Russian film tradition. You will analyze the mechanisms of propaganda and see how it works by depicting "good" and "evil" and how it changes with a new political agenda of the Soviet/Russian state. You will broaden your knowledge of the main historical events in Russia during the 20th and 21st centuries. During class discussions, you will compare the Western paradigms of propaganda and alterity to Soviet and post-Soviet. Upon completing the course, you will learn about prominent film directors and the major masterpieces of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema of the 20th century. During the course, we will analyze how the major historical events were represented on the screen and what message they delivered to the audience. No knowledge of Russian required. No class prerequisites.
RUSS 323/CWL 323/ENG 323/: Tolstoy
The course will trace Tolstoy’s development as a writer and a deeply conflicted if fascinating thinker. Readings include Childhood, The Sevastopol Stories, The Cossacks, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Il’ich, The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as some of Tolstoy’s philosophical and political works. No knowledge of Russian is necessary.