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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Spring 2018 |
Registration ID | RUSSB214001 |
Course Title | Anna Karenina & Tasks of Liter |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Comparative Literature |
Instructor | Grigoryan,Bella |
Times and Days | MW 01:10pm-02:30pm
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Room Location | CH116 |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2210 This course takes Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as its centerpiece and most sustained point of interest. We will begin with a few of Tolstoy's important early works (notably, his Childhood. Boyhood. Youth.), then read Anna Karenina slowly and in detail, identifying its chief formal and thematic characteristics and thinking about the novel's aesthetics in relation to the ethical questions it raises. These questions traverse a broad range of topics from marital infidelity and legally recognized forms of kinship to a critique of Russian imperial geopolitics and military interventions from a standpoint that prefigures Tolstoy's late-in-life radical pacifism. Next, we will read three novels (Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin) that, much as they predate Tolstoy's masterpiece, help us bring the central preoccupations of Anna Karenina into sharper focus. We will conclude the course with Tolstoy's late short works, a short story by Anton Chekhov, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which we will contemplate as a reply to and a potential re-writing of Anna Karenina, since the English modernist famously declared that she had "nearly every scene of Anna Karenina branded in [her.]" All readings in English. Approach: Critical Interpretation (CI);, ; |
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