| Unit name | Writing Revolution: Russian Literature, 1910-1940 |
|---|---|
| Unit code | RUSS30068 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Dr. Chitnis |
| Open unit status | Open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Russian |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit will advance students’ knowledge and understanding of Russian fiction, drama and poetry written between 1910 and 1940. Rather than subordinate the study of literature to the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath,
students will examine how writers express and react to a time of radical movement and change in many spheres of human life, including society, culture, linguistics, science, psychology and anthropology.
They will explore topics including ideas of modernity, attitudes to revolution and change, linguistic and formal experiment, didacticism and anti-didacticism, literature and ideology.
They will closely study major and less familiar works by the leading writers of the period, including Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Fadeev, Kataev, Kharms, Khlebnikov, Maiakovskii, Mandel’shtam, Olesha, Pasternak, Pil’niak, Platonov, Tsvetaeva and Zamiatin.
Students will acquire a complex, thorough understanding of the features of Russian Modernism in its socio-political and cultural context and in the broader theoretical context of literary Modernism.
Students will be able to;
a) Recognise and provide sophisticated interpretations of the treatment of key linguistic and thematic features in Russian Modernist writing;
b) Use these skills to provide extended, original comparative literary analysis of two or more primary texts;
c) Construct an advanced, complex argument that enables the comparative interpretation of two or more primary texts;
d) Identify the aims and evaluate in depth the success of critical literature devoted to Russian Modernist writing.
1 x weekly lecture
1 x weekly seminar
1 x 3000-word essay (60%) (ILOs: a, b, c, d)
1 x 2000-word commentary task (40%) (ILOs:a,b,c,d)
Evgenii Zamiatin – We
Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981)
George Gibian et al (eds), Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-garde, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1976)
Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil'. Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968)
Stephen Hutchings, Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997)
