Related Courses, Spring 2021

Comparison of the political systems of the major European countries. Topics include political institutions, electoral politics and political parties, public policies, and contemporary problems.

 

The course examines major French literary and artistic movements of the last decades of the nineteenth century (Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism) in their cultural context. Weekly reading assignments pair literary texts with contemporary theoretical/medical/political discourse on such topics as disease, crime, sex, poverty, colonialism, nationalism, and technology. Literary authors include Barbey, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Rachilde, Villiers, and Zola. Theorists include Bergson, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Le Bon, Nordau, Renan, and Simmel. Some attention also paid to the visual arts.

 

The course discusses exemplary novels in German language after 1945 from West and East Germany and Germany after Reunification, as well as from Austria and Switzerland. Part I, “Zero Hour - or Not,” on the political critique of Nazi Germany and the attempt at an aesthetic clean break (e.g., Gunther Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch); Part II “1968: Revolution or New Interiority,” on social protest versus aesthetic internationalism (e.g., Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Hubert Fichte, Thomas Bernhard); Part III, “The Attempt at Being Contemporary,” on German and German speaking societies in the global world (e.g., Elfriede Jelinek, Yoko Tawada, Rainald Goetz). While “contemporaneity” is the particular mark of the last section, all works desire to critically intervene in their historical moment. Giving an account of this desire is the goal of the course. Contextualization as needed; close reading of selected passages as the mode of work in the course; all works are provided in English translation and German.

 

A thematic survey of major issues in modern east European history, with emphasis on recent historiography. A reading course with multiple brief writing assignments.

 

An introduction to the various lines of inquiry informing the history of sexuality. The course asks how historians and others constitute sexuality as an object of inquiry and addresses different arguments about the evolution of sexuality in Europe, including the relationship between sexuality and the state and sexuality and gender.

 

The seminar is designed to give a broad understanding of the lines of theorizing and types of research that animate the study of human rights issues and human rights mobilizations in post-Soviet Russia. Acquainting students with academic research in history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the seminar seeks to analyze these topics going beyond media portrayals of Russian society and binary oppositions that often structure narratives of post-Soviet social and political reality (state vs. civil society, rule of law vs. kangaroo justice, democracy vs. authoritarianism, repression vs. resistance). This course analyzes how “human rights” have been constructed—as a cause, as a discourse, as a legal and institutional framework—since the Soviet dissident movement, then in the 1990s and 2000s, until today, when “human rights” have become a dominant frame on a number of very heterogeneous issues for media and activists denouncing the political regime in Putin’s Russia. It pays particular attention to the sociology of actors, as well as to historical, political, and social conditions of emergence and development of human rights mobilizations. The course also focuses on various empirical case studies on highly mediatized human rights issues: political prisoners, protest-related trials, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, prison and penitentiary institutions. These case studies provide students with a broader empirical knowledge of contemporary Russian society and serve as a magnifying glass, as they highlight complex dynamics of Russian politics and law in the past thirty years.

 

A wide-ranging examination of a variety of questions and problems in the cultural, political, and social history of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire through the study of inscriptions in both Greek and Latin. Topics include law and imperialism, peer-polity interaction, local identity, memory and monumentality, aristocratic self-fashioning, and Greek culture under Roman rule. Ample attention is given to methodological issues. No previous experience in epigraphy required.

 

A study of important Italian films from World War II to the present. Consideration of works that typify major directors and trends. Topics include neorealism, self-reflexivity and metacinema, fascism and war, and postmodernism. Films by Fellini, Antonioni, Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Wertmuller, Tornatore, and Moretti. Films in Italian with English subtitles.

 

This seminar suggests a research project to investigate the affinity between the legal discipline and the science of the soul, or, if you wish, between the science of the soul and the body of law. The point of departure for our framing argument—the existence of this affinity—is that at different moments in history, the legal science (in the form of legal scholarship, religious law, or even legislation) has toiled to appropriate cognitive processes (the external senses, for instance) and post-sensorial operations (imagination, fantasy, memory, etc.). However, this appropriation has become, at different moments in history, so naturalized, so dissolved, so automatized, that it has become invisible for us, and that, because of this invisibility, the affinity can continue doing a political work that is not always evident to us readers, citizens, and clients of the law. In this seminar we read Iberian and Mediterranean primary sources from different confessions, in different languages, and within different legal and political backgrounds—from pre-Socratic thinkers to al-Ghazali, from Averroes and Maimonides to Alfonso X, from Parisian theologians to Spinoza, etc. Likewise, we read theoretical work that allow us to conceptualize the kind of research we are doing.

 

This course examines the challenges of democratic transition and consolidation in Europe in an exciting way using contemporary and historical political research, documentary and dramatic film, a non-fiction graphic novel, and in class debates. Together we explore political themes like authoritarianism, state collapse, nationalism, ethnic conflict, transitional justice, and democratic development through the turbulent political history of Southeastern Europe, which provides a solid theoretical foundation for the understanding of past and current events around the world.

 

The major European playwrights active from 1879 (the premiere of Ibsen’s Doll’s House) to 1989 (the death of Beckett) were responsible for theatrical advances of continuing influence and importance. This seminar traces the advent of dramatic naturalism and realism (early Ibsen and Strindberg, the major plays of Chekhov); the contrary movement toward symbolist subtlety and expressionist urgency (late Strindberg and Ibsen, early Brecht); the effort to shoulder the burden of history and engage contemporary politics (Shaw, middle- and late-period Brecht); and the opening of drama to the ambiguities of religion and philosophy (Beckett). The seminar is grounded in close readings of representative plays but also considers how dramas change under the pressures of performance. Readings in theater theory, manifestos, and criticism supplement the primary texts.

 

This course offers an interdisciplinary overview of modernist culture in Russia. Focus is on how poets, prose writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians (from Merezhkovsky to Stravinsky, from Diaghilev to Lenin) interacted with each other and how imperial Russia developed its own modernist culture in global context. Topics include institutions of art and media; literary journals and groups; translation and book market; theater as industry; European thoughts in Russia; theosophy and literature; modernist sexuality; prerevolutionary urban culture; gentry life; dance, music, costume design; Russia between East and West; revolution and modernism. Students establish an in-depth understanding of the cultural milieu in Russia from the 1890s to the 1910s and are introduced to the scholarly discourses on Russian modernism.

 

From 1918 to the mid-1930s, Moscow and Berlin were central gathering points for left-wing modernists. Each city developed its own modes of modernism, yet in sustained dialogue, given massive Russian emigration to Berlin after 1918, the Weimar obsession with early Soviet aesthetics (and cinema), intellectuals traveling in both directions, and the large-scale emigration of German leftists to the Soviet Union after 1933. And in the late 1940s and ’50s, Soviet intellectuals (and German emigrants returning from Moscow) shaped a “late modernism” in East Berlin. Centered on literature and film, the course also considers a wide array of art forms (including painting, photography, architecture, music, and aesthetic theory). Works by modernists such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Nabokov, Shklovsky, El Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Tretiakov, Lukács, Moholy-Nagy, Benjamin, Brecht, Richter, Beckmann, Grosz, Heartfield, Höch, Lang, Döblin, Ruttmann, Mies van der Rohe, Eisler, Busch, Konrad Wolf, Peter Weiss.

 

A reading seminar addressing recent work on Russian and Soviet history grounded in the ongoing “archival revolution” that began in the late 1980s. After reviewing the major earlier paradigms, we examine how they were overturned or significantly modified by archival-based evidence. Topics include the development of government and the law; historical actors and places marginalized by the earlier historiography, such as non-capital regions, the middle classes, conservatism, religion, and (more generally) non-state structures; and Russia’s position in the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods as a vast and complex multiethnic political entity. Class discussions in English. Readings in English with Russian options available.

 

Imperial reckoning for colonial violence has gained a new momentum in recent years, from official apologies for colonial violence; to reparations lawsuits filed in Asia, Europe, and the United States for slavery, genocide, and massacres; to demands for the return of bodily remains and cultural artifacts from established cultural institutions. This seminar explores how these new attempts for belated imperial reckoning are reshaping relations between former empires and their ex-colonies. It approaches imperial reckoning as a site for redressing not only the original violence but also the transitional injustice incurred in the process of the unmaking of empire, which calls for post-imperial reckoning. Drawing on examples from recent cases, this course explores what it means to belatedly reckon with imperial violence today. What does it mean to reckon with imperial violence through legal means, decades after the dissolution of empires? What is the role of law in belated redress? How is historical responsibility articulated and by whom? Who is responsible for what, then and now? What are the stakes in reckoning with distant, yet still alive, pasts? Why and how does it matter today for those of us who have no direct experience of imperial violence? This course approaches these questions through an anthropological exploration of concepts such as debt, moral economy, structural violence, complicity and implication, and abandonment.

 

This course examines debates about and lived experiences of race, nationality, and diversity in Russia and the former Soviet Union. In the context of a global rise in nationalism and populism, post-socialist countries too have grappled with questions about migration and diversity. This course takes these debates as a window into how people and governments negotiate cultural belonging and difference. By focusing on debates about race, diversity, and belonging, this course introduces students to an emerging field in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. Bringing together readings and methods from history and anthropology and taking advantage of the robust Internet culture of blogs, memes, and videos, the course examines how politics and culture meet in contemporary debates about representation.

 

This course covers readings in European cultural history from 1789 to the present, with a focus on Western Europe.

 

In the eighteenth century, the novel became a popular literary form in many parts of Europe. Yet now-standard narratives of its “rise” often offer a temporally and linguistically foreshortened view. This seminar examines key early modern novels in a range of European languages, centered on the dialogue between highly influential eighteenth-century British and French novels (Montesquieu, Defoe, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, Edgeworth). We begin by considering a sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque life history (Lazarillo de Tormes) and Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century secret history of French court intrigue; contemplate a key sentimental Goethe novella; and end with Romantic fiction (an Austen novel, a Kleist novella, Pushkin’s historical novel fragment). These works raise important issues about cultural identity and historical experience, the status of women (including as readers and writers), the nature of society, the vicissitudes of knowledge—and novelistic form. We also examine several major literary-historical accounts of the novel’s generic evolution, audiences, timing, and social function, and historiographical debates about the novel’s rise (contrasting English-language accounts stressing the novel’s putatively British genesis, and alternative accounts sketching a larger European perspective). The course gives special emphasis to the improvisatory, experimental character of early modern novels, as they work to reground fiction in the details and reality of contemporary life. Many epistolary, philosophical, sentimental, and Gothic novels present themselves as collections of “documents”—letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions—carefully assembled, impartially edited, and only incidentally conveying stories as well as information. The seminar explores these novels’ documentary ambitions; their attempt to touch, challenge, and change their readers; and their paradoxical influence on “realist” conventions (from the emergence of omniscient, impersonal narrators to techniques for describing time and place).

 

This course examines critical issues in Russian politics. We use historical and comparative approaches towards Russian political development. We analyze the transformations of political regime and state-society relations in post-Soviet Russia in comparative perspective. We focus on the political logic of economic reforms, influence of the oligarchs, governance, center-periphery relations, authoritarianism, nationalism, civil society, media, and foreign policy.

 

This graduate seminar explores Russian Symbolist poetry in cultural and international contexts. We study the philosophical foundations (Nietzsche, Solovyov); the preoccupation with various temporalities (modernity); the longing for total art (Wagner) bounded by lyric form; aestheticism; utopianism; decadence; and other topics. Our readings include the works of Vladimir Solovyov, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Fedor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, and Aleksandr Blok—as well as of “post-Symbolists” Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Our approach emphasizes prosody, genre, and medium as well as the dissemination of ideas across media and cultures. Weekly practices involve close reading, research, theoretical reframing, and ongoing collaborative participation and presentations.

 

Up-close study of contemporary social movements, protests, and rebellions, with a focus on Eastern Europe and a wide comparative perspective. Readings and discussions take up topics such as individual and group agency; ideas of utopia, change, and critique; and notions of justice. Emphasis on ethnographic approaches that consider protest and rebellion from the perspectives of everyday life and transformation.

 

Study of the domestic and international determinants of functional states from antiquity to the present. Analysis of state formation in Europe from premodern times and outside Europe from colonial times. Topics include centralization of power, capacity to tax, and contract enforcement.

 

Overview of the Poetics, Culture, History and Political dynamics of Modern Hebrew Literature as a national literature over the last 300 years. The course will trace the literary development of its diasporic condition in Europe through the Hebrew Literature that is created in the Israeli Jewish sovereignty. Readings in translation.

 

Origins and development of the European Community and Union over the past fifty years; ways in which the often conflicting ambitions of its member states have shaped the EU; relations between member states and the EU’s supranational institutions and politics; and economic, political, and geopolitical challenges.

 

The threats to liberal democracy are being widely debated, from the US and Europe to developing nations.   In order for democracy to continue to thrive as the cornerstone of Western governance, it must adapt and be relevant to citizens of the 21st century. This course examines our appreciation of what constitutes democracy today and how to apply those understandings to the challenges of the 21st century. Our discussions look at the characteristics of democratic leaders and debate whether America, the bulwark of liberal democracy in the 20th century, is still an exporter of democracy and how that matters in today’s world. We then look at how to protect and adapt democratic institutions such as free elections, civil society, dissent, and the free press in the face of a rising wave of populism and nationalism. The course examines how refugee crises from conflict regions and immigration impact democracies and debate the accelerating paradigm shifts of income inequality and technology on democratic institutions.  We conclude the course with a discussion of the forms of democratic governance that are meaningful in the 21st century and the practicalities of designing or reforming democratic institutions to confront current challenges. 

 

Agnieszka Pasieka

E&RS 529 / RSEE 352 / ANTH 350

This seminar explores major aspects of twentieth-century Jewish politics with an emphasis on new forms of political practice.

 

This course examines the factors—political, socioeconomic, and ideological—that have shaped U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War, as well as specific issues in bilateral relations, including arms control, counterterrorism, energy, and regional affairs. The goal is to understand the way each country constructs relations with the other to advance its own national interests, and the implications of U.S.-Russian relations for global affairs.

 

Examination of theoretical and empirical literature in response to questions about the insurgency and uneasy peace in Northern Ireland following the peace agreement of 1998 which formally ended the three-decade long civil conflict known widely as The Troubles and was often lauded as the most successful of its kind in modern history. Consideration of how both the conflict and the peace have been messier and arguably more divisive than most outside observers realize.

 

The nature, raison d’être, and value of “political art” are among the most vexed questions in art history and criticism. Since the 1960s—and, in truth, since the 1860s—aesthetic conservatives have inveighed against work that eschews “beauty” and “art for art’s sake” for the purposes of art portraying the ugliness of the modern world or work made to convey a message about that world and the contradictions of society and humankind. “Pure” art was treated as a transcendent, ideal expression of art’s essential character and capacities. “Political art” was deemed its antithesis. Conversely, some “committed artists” came to view all forms of art that dealt with “nonpolitical” subjects or situations, or explored the parameters of “beauty,” as ipso facto retrograde aestheticism. Needless to say—but I’ll say it anyway—both sides of this crude divide are in error. There is no such thing as an art form with no political or social strings attached, and there is no art form, no matter how austere or displeasing, without an aesthetic dimension. Still, these debates are never as abstract and general as is the rhetoric employed on both sides, and it only matters to artists when it comes down to cases. This seminar traces the overall arc of this dialectic across time, geography, and cultures from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Europe, to the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the postcolonial era. Conducted on Zoom, the course consists of lectures/expositions by the instructor and members of the class, readings and discussions, and viewing and collective interpretation of pertinent works. Sessions run approximately three hours. Weekly conversations center on concrete examples of “political art” from the instructor’s collection, some of it sanctioned by prevailing political power as well as examples that contest it. Requirements are consistent attendance, participation in the dialogue, a brief writing assignment, and a “project” in a medium and format of the student’s choice. Enrollment limited to twelve. With the instructor’s permission, there may be room for a handful of auditors. Preference is given to School of Art students but, space permitting, Yale students from other departments are welcome.