Russian 20th Century Short Stories course outline 2018-19

Department of Modern Languages and Culture/Department of Comparative Literatures and Cultures School of Languages, Linguistics and Film Queen Mary, University of London COM5021/RUS4021/5021 Russian Short Stories: The Twentieth Century Pre-requisite: none (for the RUS5021, ability to read in Russian) Assessment: COM5021/RUS5021: One 1500-word essay (40 per cent); one 2500-word essay (60 per cent) RUS4021 students: 1000-word essay (40 percent); one 2000 word essay (60 percent) Credit Value: 15 credits Level: 4/5 Semester: 1/3; Timetable: Lecture and Seminar Monday am - 11, Bancroft 3.11 Organiser: Professor Jeremy Hicks Contact details: Room: Arts One, 2.43; Office hours: Mon 12.30-1.30, Tues 2-3, Tel.: 020 7882 8306; j.g.hicks@qmul.ac.uk All students are expected to follow the School's guidelines and regulations, set out in the handbook, in all matters regarding this module Students must note that failure to so may result in de-registration from the module, which may have a significant impact on their overall degree classification DESCRIPTION While the novel has enjoyed a privileged status for much of the twentieth century, for important periods the short story dominated Russian culture After defining and analyzing the specific features of the short story form, its theorizations, long critical neglect and the prejudice against it as a fragmentary form, this course focuses on periods where short stories came to the fore in Russia: the beginning and end of the century and the period of World War Two LEARNING OUTCOMES OF THE MODULE COM5021 and RUS5021 students will acquire the capacity to: • • • • Identify the defining characteristics of and dominant approaches to defining short stories Identify the specific attraction and features of the short story in the context of Russian literature in the twentieth century Define the relation between the stories discussed in class and the political, philosophical and social debates of the day demonstrate the understanding and application of key theoretical and critical • • • concepts demonstrate the study habits and the interpretive skills necessary to processing short prose demonstrate 'close reading' skills demonstrate their enhanced command of essay writing skills and academic English Students taking RUS 5021: • will have acquired increased fluency in reading in Russian and will have developed their Russian vocabulary ASSIGNMENT DEADLINES 1000 (RUS4021) /1500-word essay (RUS5021,COM5021) (40 per cent): Sunday 11 November 23.55 (Last day of Reading Week) 2000 (RUS4021)/2500-word essay (RUS5021,COM5021) (60 per cent): Sunday 16 December 23.55 (First Sunday after end of term) MARKING CRITERIA According to the student handbook SUBMISSION OF COURSEWORK On QMPlus Required Reading and Module Schedule Each week students are required read a single story in Russian and relate it to a single piece of secondary reading The further reading section indicates further relevant stories by the writer, and further reading on her or his work Week Introduction, Definition of the Short Story Lyudmila Parts, ‘Introduction: The Short Story as the Genre of Cultural Transition,’ The Russian Twentieth-Century Short Story: A Critical Companion, ed with an intro by Lyudmila Parts, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010, xiii-xxxii Week - Pre-revolutionary World Ivan Bunin, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ (1916) in Chandler (ed.), Russian Short Stories Gaiton Marullo, Thomas If You See the Buddha: Studies in the Fiction of Ivan Bunin Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1998 (excerpt) Week - The 1920s Mikhail Zoshchenko, ‘The Bathhouse,’ (1925) ‘The Crisis’ (1925) in Chandler (ed.), Russian Short Stories Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz, Nottingham: Astra, 2000 (ch 5) Week - 1930s Andrei Platonov ‘The River Potudan,’ (1937) in Andrey Platonov, The Return and Other Stories, trans Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone, London: Harvill, 1999, 98-134 Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 194-98 Week 5- Emigration Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Spring in Fialta,’(1936/47) in Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories, Penguin, 2010, 472-91 John Burt Foster Jr, ‘Nabokov’s Art of Memory: Recollected Emotion in “Spring in Fialta,”’ in Parts (ed.), The Russian Twentieth-Century Short Story, 97-116 Week – World War II Aleksei Tolstoi, Russian Character (1944) http://az.lib.ru/t/tolstoj_a_n/text_0110.shtml Anna Krylova, ‘“Healers of Wounded Souls”: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944–1946,’ Journal of Modern History, Vol 73, No (June 2001), pp 307-331 Week - Reading Week First assessment deadline: Sunday 11 November 23.55 (Last day of Reading Week) Week - The Gulag Varlam Shalamov, ‘Through the Snow,’ ‘Berries,’ (1959/73) ‘The Snake Charmer,’ (1954/67) in Chandler (ed.), Russian Short Stories Sarah J Young ‘Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy,’ Slavic Review, Vol: (2011), 353-372 Week - Village Prose and essay feedback workshop Vaily Shukshin, ‘Cutting them down to size,’ in Stories from a Siberian Village, trans Laura Michael and John Givens, with a foreword by Kathleen Parthé, De Kalb, Northen Illinois University Press, 1996, 21-29 Diane Ignashev Nemec, ‘Vasilii Shukshin’s “Cut Down to Size” (Srezal) and the Question of Transition,” in The Russian Twentieth-Century Short Story: A Critical Companion, ed with an intro by Lyudmila Parts, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010, 217238 Essay Feedback workshop Week 10 - Dissidence Sergei Dovlatov, ‘"Straight Ahead" in Sergei Dovlatov, The Zone: A Prison Guard’s Notes, trans Anne Frydman, Richmond: One World Classics, 2011, 165-80 Jekaterina Young, Sergei Dovlatov and his Narrative Masks, Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2009 (excerpt) Week 11 - Beyond the Soviet Era Liudmila Petrushevskaia, ‘Songs of the Eastern Slavs’ (‘Incident at Sokolniki’ etc.) in Petrushevskaia, Ludmilla There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, selected and translated with an introduction by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers, London: Penguin, 2009 Nina Kolesnikoff, ‘The Generic Structure of Ljudmila Petruševskaja's Pesni Vostočnyx Slavjan,’ The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol 37, No (Summer, 1993), pp 220-230 Week 12 - Russian Post-Modernism and essay workshop Viktor Pelevin, ‘Nika,’ (1997) in Victor Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, London: Faber, 2001 Olga Bogdanova, ‘The “Traditional Postmodernism” of Viktor Pelevin’s Short Story, “Nika,”’ in Parts (ed.) The Russian Twentieth Century Short Story, 327-41 Essay workshop Second Essay Deadline: Sunday 16 December 23.55 (First Sunday after end of term) Further Reading Week (and general course reading) Definitions, Theorisations and Historicisations of the Russian Short Story Edith W Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2011 Dobrenko, E A (ed.), The Cambridge companion to twentieth-century Russian literature, 2011 Eikhenbaum, Boris ‘O’Henry and the Theory of the Short Story,’ in May, The Russian Twentieth-Century Short Story: A Critical Companion, ed with an intro by Lyudmila Parts, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010 Lohafer, Susan Reading for storyness : preclosure theory, empirical poetics, and culture in the short story, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003 Lohafer, Susan and Jo Ellyn Clarey (eds), The Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, Baton Rouge/London: Luoisiana State University Press, 1989 May, Charles E (ed.) , The New Short Story Theories, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994 Moser, Charles A The Russian Short Story: A Critical History, Boston: Twayne , 1986 Parts, Lyudmila, ‘Introduction: The Short Story as the Genre of Cultural Transition,’ in The Russian Twentieth-Century Short Story: A Critical Companion, ed with an intro by Lyudmila Parts, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010, xiii- xxxii Pratt, Mary Louise “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” Poetics, 10:2-3 (1981), 175-94 Also in Charles E May (ed.) , The New Short Story Theories, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994 Tynianov, Iurii ‘The Literary Fact,’ in Modern Genre Theory ed Duff New Short Story Theories, Winther, Per, Jocon Lothe and Has H Skei (eds), The Art of Brevity Excursion into Short Story Theory and Analysis, Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 2004 Week 2: Bunin Ivan Bunin Collected Stories , trans Graham Hettlinger, Chicago, 2007 Julian Connolly, Ivan Bunin, Boston: Twayne, 1982 A Volkov, Proza Ivana Bunina, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1969, 258-79 James B Woodward, Ivan Bunin: A Study of his Fiction, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Presss, 1980, 107-33 Week 3: Zoshchenko Mikhail Zoshchenko, The Galosh and Other Stories, trans Jeremy Hicks, London: Angel, 2000 Lesley Milne, Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership: How They Laughed, Birmingham:Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, 2003 Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance : Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 Jenny Kaminer, ‘Theatrical Motifs and the Drama of Everyday Life in the 1920s Stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko,’ Russian Review, Vol 65, No (Jul., 2006), pp 470-490 Week 4: Platonov Andrey Platonov, The Return and Other Stories, trans Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone, London: Harvill, 1999 Keith A Livers, Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004 E Korchagina, ‘O nekotorykh osobennostiakh skazovoi formy v rasskaze “Reka Potudan ´,”’ in V.P Skobelev et al (eds), Tvorchestvo A Platonova, Voronezh: Izdatel´stvo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1970, 107-16 Philip Ross Bullock, The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov, Oxford: Legenda, 2005, 151-201 Week 5: Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories, London: Penguin, 1995 Maxim D Shrayer, The World of Nabokov's Stories, Austin: University of Texas, 2000 Stephen Matterson, ‘Sprung from the Music Box of Memory: “Spring in Fialta,”’ in Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo (eds), A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction, New York: Garland, 1993, 99-109 Week 6: Aleksei Tolstoi Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was (Un)made: Cultural Fantasy and male Subjectivity Under Stalin, Pittsburgh: University of Pitssburgh Press, 2008 Katherine Hodgson, ‘The Soviet War,’ in Marina MacKay (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Second World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 111-122 M Charnyi Put´ Alekseia Tolstogo: ocherk tvorchestva, 2nd edn, Moscow: Khudozhestvannaia literatura, 1981, 226-35 Petr Pavlenko, ‘Istoriia dvukh rasskazov,’ in Sobranie sochinenii, Vols, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol.1, 430-31 Konstantin Trenev, ‘V sem´e,’ in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, Vols, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol 510-23 Week 8: Shalamov Shalamov, Varlam Kolyma Tales, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 Leona Toker, ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies,’ Poetics Today, Vol 18, No (Summer, 1997), pp 187-222 Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000 Violeta Davoliute, ‘Shalamov's Memory,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol 47, No 1/2 (March-June 2005), pp 1-21 Nathaniel Golden, Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales: A Formalist Analysis, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004 Week 9: Shukshin Vasily Shukshin, Stories from a Siberian Village, trans Laura Michael and John Givens, with a foreword by Kathleen Parthé, De Kalb, Northen Illinois University Press, 1996 John Givens, Prodigal Son: Vasilii Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture, Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2000 (excerpt) Nicole Christian, ‘Manifestations of the Eccentric in the Works of Vasilii Shukshin,’ The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol 75, No (Apr., 1997), pp 201-215 Week 10: Dovlatov Sergei Dovlatov, The Zone, trans Anne Frydman, London: Alma Classics, 2011 David J Galloway, ‘Sergei Dovlatov's Zona as Metatextual Memoir,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol 50, No 3/4 (September-December 2008), pp 325-340 ‘Polemical Allusions in Russian Gulag Prose,’ The Slavic and East European Journal, 51: (2007), pp 535-52 Karen Ryan-Hayes, ‘Narrative Strategies in the Works of Sergei Dovlatov,’ Russian Language Journal, 45 1994, 155-78 Olga Soboleva, ‘“It Is Only Chekhov That One Wants to Be Like”: Chekhov and Dovlatov – The Art of a Storyteller,’ in Andrew, Joe (ed and preface); Reid, Robert (ed and preface) Chekhov 2004: Chekhov Special Issues in Two Volumes, Vol II: Chekhov and Others Keele, England: Keele University Students Union; 2006, 305-18 Olga Tabachnikova, ‘“The World Is Ugly and People Are Sad”: On Chekhov's Ethics and Aesthetics in the Works of Sergei Dovlatov, in Andrew, Joe (ed and preface); Reid, Robert (ed and preface) Chekhov 2004: Chekhov Special Issues in Two Volumes, Vol II: Chekhov and Others Keele, England: Keele University Students Union; 2006,’ 31954 Week 11: Petrushevskaia Ludmilla Petrushevskaia, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, selected and translated with an introduction by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers, London: Penguin, 2009 Sally Dalton-Brown, Voices From the Void: The Genres of Liudmilla Petrushevskaia, New York and Oxford: Berghan, 2001 Kolesnikoff, Nina ‘The Narrative Structure of Liudmila Petrushevskaia's Short Stories,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers/ Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol 32, No (December 1990), pp 444-56 Week 12: Pelevin Victor Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, London: Faber, 2001 Sally Dalton-Brown, ‘Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair? Viktor Pelevin and Russian Postmodernist Prose,’ The Slavonic and East European Review, 75:2 (1997), 216-233 Laird, Sally Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 ... Cambridge companion to twentieth -century Russian literature, 2011 Eikhenbaum, Boris ‘O’Henry and the Theory of the Short Story,’ in May, The Russian Twentieth -Century Short Story: A Critical Companion,... Bogdanova, ‘The “Traditional Postmodernism” of Viktor Pelevin’s Short Story, “Nika,”’ in Parts (ed.) The Russian Twentieth Century Short Story, 327-41 Essay workshop Second Essay Deadline: Sunday... Nabokov, Collected Stories, Penguin, 2010, 472-91 John Burt Foster Jr, ‘Nabokov’s Art of Memory: Recollected Emotion in “Spring in Fialta,”’ in Parts (ed.), The Russian Twentieth -Century Short Story,