Graduate Studies

Modern & Medieval Languages

Graduate Studies



MPhil in Russian Studies | Course Content

Course Content



CORE COURSE

The Core Course runs continuously throughout the Michaelmas term and is attended by all students. It is designed to provide you with key skills and knowledge for further research in the field. It will give you a framework - theoretical, historical and conceptual - within which to situate your specific research material for the MPhil Modules and the Thesis.

The central part of the Core Course course consists of five double sessions. Each of the five sessions will introduce you to a different disciplinary or theoretical approach to material. In addition to the double sessions there will be a single session introducing students to the practicalities of library-based research into Russian material, a single session on internet-based research, and a double session on writing skills.

Тhe Core Course will also develop your skills in the close reading of different types of primary texts and secondary texts, combining formal analysis with contextual and theoretical considerations appropriate to the discipline.

MODULES 2012-13 (any two to be chosen)

Students make a choice of two Modules, one of which must be from the MPhil in Russian Studies. The second module can be taken from the MPhil in Russian Studies or borrowed from selected MPhil courses, as detailed below. 

The following modules will be available to students on the MPhil in Russian Studies in 2012/13. Outlines only are provided below. Students make their choice of modules in October and reading lists will be provided in the 4th week of Michaelmas Term for the modules that students choose to take.

COURSE-SPECIFIC MODULES

  • RS2 The Culture of Pre-Petrine Russia (Prof. Simon Franklin)
  • RS4 Twentieth Century Russian Culture: Literature, Visual Art and Politics (Dr. Jana Howlett)
  • RS6 Transitions from Communism to Post-Communism (Dr Uilleam Blacker and Dr Julie Fedor)
  • RS9(ANTH) State Socialism and Post-Socialist Transformations: Anthropological Perspectives (Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov)
  • RS10(HIST) World War II and the Soviet State (Dr Olga Kucherenko)

SHARED/BORROWABLE MODULES

These modules can be borrowed by Russian MPhil students only.

  • RS/EUROLIT The Modern City (Dr Katya Haustein)
  • RS/EUROLIT Marginalities in the Nineteenth Century (Nr Alison Sinclair, Dr Nick White)
  • RS/SMS  Urban Cinematics (Dr Francois Penz)

Module Descriptions:

RS2: The Culture of Pre-Petrine Russia. Convenor: Professor Simon Franklin (Slavonic Studies)

This course will examine some of the principal features of Russian culture from its origins until the 'Petrine Revolution'. Sessions will be devoted to: sources for the study of early Russian culture; origins and precursors; social contexts for cultural production; and various forms and genres (painting, architecture, writing); theoretical and hermeneutic problems in the study of early Russian culture; and receptions and transformations of early Russian culture in the post-Petrine age.

Some sessions will be devoted to broad issues of theory and approach, and to period surveys, but the module will also involve close analysis of specific material. Although the module spans several disciplines - history, history of literature, history of art, historical linguistics, cultural studies - no prior expertise or specialist knowledge is required.

Study for the module will be self-contained in the Lent Term, but interested students may find it helpful to attend the undergraduate lecture courses for Papers RU3 and RU4, which commence during the Michaelmas Term.

RS4: Twentieth Century Russian Culture: Literature, Visual Art and Politics. Convenor: Dr. Jana Howlett (Slavonic Studies)

This module is aimed at students who wish to expand their understanding of Russian culture during the twentieth century. During the transition from Imperial to Soviet to Post-Soviet, the political context of Russian and Soviet culture was difficult to ignore. In facing up to the challenge of ever-shifting boundaries of permitted practice, writers and artists devised numerous strategies, chief among them engagement, estrangement or accommodation. 

This module will discuss these strategies through a series of chronological sessions dedicated to the approaches chosen by specific practitioners. The question of the relationship between a text and its political context will dominate the module, but students will be encouraged to debate this in the broader context of intellectual and aesthetic worlds within which such practitioners operated. 

The module is open to all those who have a good passive command of Russian, whether or not they have previously studied the period.

RS6 Transition from Communism to Post-Communism. Convenors: Dr Uilleam Blacker and Dr Julie Fedor

The module examines the political, social and cultural processes that characterised the shift from communism to post-communism in the USSR/post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. The module is split into two complementary strands, one dealing with the transformations in politics and the growth of civil society, the other on cultural processes. The political strand examines the processes involved in the transformation from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. It also deals with the development of civil society in Soviet Russia, and its continuation in the Russian Federation, and examines the dynamic relationships between civil society and the state in both contexts. The cultural strand will focus on phenomena in literature and art that reflected and catalysed the transition, such as the Sots Art work of Ilya Kabakov, the poetry of Dmitrii Prigov or the prose of Vladimir Sorokin. Second, the module looks at cultural responses to the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a focus on questions of postcolonialism and gender. This part of the module looks at the transition from communism to postcommunism both from the centre and from the margin of the post-Soviet sphere, incorporating writers from Ukraine as well as Russia (Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Oksana Zabuzhko, Andrei Kurkov and Iurii Andrukhovych). 

This interdisciplinary approach will provide students with a more complete understanding of the transformations that took place in the glasnost’/perestroika years and the immediate post-Soviet period, demonstrating and analysing the intimate relationship between state, society and culture that characterized that period.

RS9(ANTH): State Socialism and Post-Socialist Transformations: Anthropological Perspectives (Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov)

This module focuses on case studies of Russia and the Soviet Union, and examines key issues in the anthropology of socialism and post-socialist transformations. These issues include power relations, everyday social structures, religion, cultural imagination of identities and differences, subjectivity, 'the inner self', meanings of space and history under state socialism and its aftermath. Some of the discussion will also cover Soviet/Russian anthropology and Orientalism. We shall ask what theoretical perspectives are useful for understanding socialism and post-socialism and what new questions are posed by these unique materials. The purpose of this course is to provide an in-depth introduction to current scholarship in the anthropology of Soviet and Russian societies, and to discuss the main theoretical approaches to Soviet-type societies which have been developed in anthropology.

RS10(HIST) World War II and the Soviet State (Dr Olga Kucherenko)

Arguably, of all the events in Soviet history the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 exerts the greatest influence on the Russian national character and identity. It continues to excite emotions, govern international relations and serve as a model of group solidarity. Throughout the long post-war period it has been a constant point of reference for Soviet/Russian ruling elites attempting to exercise social control over their subjects. And yet, as an academic theme, the War is still neglected, especially its social dimension.

A number of excellent works on the operational history offer a detailed account of how the war on the Eastern Front was fought. This module will instead concentrate on the issue of how it was managed on the Soviet homefront. Focusing on practices of mobilization, social purification, displacement, repression and myth-making, this course offers a new angle on the ways the Stalinist system survived the War, and how state actions directly influenced the experiences of ordinary people who lived, worked, fought and perished during this historic event.

It is this multiplicity of experiences that dominated the everyday existence of millions of people, who found themselves within the Soviet orbit, and shaped their understanding of the War and the system. The sheer complexity and contradiction of emotions and motivations make it impossible to reduce memory of war to the collective whole, a task desired but never fully achieved by the Soviet state. The ferocious “memory wars” currently raging throughout what used to be the Soviet “empire”, are a testimony to the limitations of such an approach and an impetus for a more inclusive yet rigorous analysis of a variety of historical sources, including memoirs, filmic and literary texts.

SHARED/BORROWABLE MODULES

These modules can be borrowed by Russian MPhil students only.

  • RS/EUROLIT The Modern City (Prof Andrew Webber) - Module offered for the MPhil in European Literature and Culture.

This modern comparative module relates directly to the research interests of a number of colleagues in the faculty. Drawing primarily on material in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and English, the module will explore changing representations and meanings of the city from the late eighteenth through to the twenty-first century. While the module explores questions of reading and interpreting the city in literary texts, photography, and painting, particular attention will be paid to the city as represented in film, a medium with which it shares a particularly close relationship. The module aims to provide an introduction to key conceptualisations of the modern city by theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Manuel Castells and Henri Lefebvre. It will be particularly concerned with the relationship between the modernist city and its postmodern counterpart, with attention to such questions as psycho-topographical explorations, technological mediations and informational networking. In the past, sessions have focused on a wide variety of specific cities, with such topics as: Berlin (walled city, open city); Rome (viewed through 'postcard films' such as La Dolce Vita); Madrid (city of desire, as mapped in the films of Almodóvar); and the 'haunted city' of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras. Sessions might equally well be devoted to other European or non-European cities (with cities such as Los Angeles and Mexico City central in current debates about urban cultures). There will be potential too for a variety of thematic aspects of the city (such as ruins, slums, suburbs, exile and invisibility) and of generic treatments (such as film noir or city symphonies). The module is comparative in spirit and in practice, and essays written for it will have to compare material either from different language cultures or different media. 

  • RS/EUROLIT  Marginalities in the Nineteenth Century (Prof, Alison Sinclair,  Dr Nick White, other contributors Dr Miranda Gill, Dr Samuel Llano, Prof Robert Gordon) - Module offered for the MPhil in European Literature and Culture.

This comparative module allows for work on topics that transcend national boundaries and which are not centred on major literary movements such as realism or naturalism. Instead the seminars will concentrate on writing at and about the margins of society, and at the margins of culture, margins that are the more significant in the 19th century because of the degree to which they mark eccentricity and the desire for control, exoticism and the attempts to impose normality, variegation and the desire for purity. The question of why deviance and marginality are such crucial topics in the 19th century, of why bourgeois readers were both obsessively interested in and ambivalent about transgression, of the seemingly insatiable demand for fiction and journalism on crime and other extreme areas of society will be central to discussions, and the texts to be studied will through be a mixture of the literary and the non-literary.  Individual sessions will be introduced by members of different departments, but will be organized thematically, with a view to opening up the opportunity for comparison with corresponding material in other areas. In 2012-3 there will be sessions presenting material from France, Spain and Italy, and a variety of theoretical approaches will be set out. Although no session with a specific focus on other languages is offered, the co-convenors will seek appropriate supervision for projects that fall outside the topics dealt with in specific sessions. Students wishing to work on other areas should contact the co-convenors at an early stage to explore how their interests can be catered for in the module.

  • RS/SMS  Urban Cinematics (Dr Francois Penz) - Module offered for the MPhil in European Literature and Culture.

For over a century, cinema has been portraying the city in all shapes and forms, providing us with screen renditions of ‘real cities’ (shot on location), ‘reconstructed cities’ (shot in the studio) and now of course ‘virtual cities’ (created digitally). The Urban Cinematics seminars aim to chart the evolution of the portrayal of cities from early cinema to present days by adopting a broad historical and chronological approach. At stake is the need to grasp the ‘city film language’ so as to take advantage of the informative, revelatory and communicative power of the moving image in order to address Patrick Keiller’s claim that cinema allow us to ‘explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future’ (2003).

Modules that will NOT be offered in 2012/13, but which have been taught within the last two years and are likely to be offered in the future:

  • RS1 Russian Literary Theory (Dr Rebecca Reich)
  • RS3 Russian and Soviet Cinema (Dr. Emma Widdis)
  • RS5 East European Memory Studies (Dr. Alexander Etkind)
  • RS7(MUS) Russian Opera and the State (Dr. Bill Quillen)
  • RS8(HOA) Questions of Identity in Russian Painting, 1757-1881 (Dr Rosalind P Blakesley)
  • RS/HIST Russia and the West 1700-1917 (Dr Hubertus Jahn)

RS1: Russian Literary Theory. Convenor: Dr Rebecca Reich (Slavonic Studies)
Where do we draw the line between literature and science in a society that encourages writers to become ‘engineers of human souls’? This module examines how Russian writers and literary critics have adapted their craft to investigate, describe and sometimes shape the mind. Moving from before the 1917 Revolution to the collapse of Soviet power, we will examine case studies of historical moments at which artistic and scientific explorations of consciousness collided and communicated. At the same time, we will consider literary theory's role as a mediator between science and art. To what extent did writers, critics and psychologists draw on each other's ideas and rhetoric? How did they cement their own authority while negotiating a changing political landscape? By exploring the development of Russian literary theory against the backdrop of the history of psychology and literature, we will question our assumptions about the boundaries between these disciplines.

RS3: Russian and Soviet Cinema. Convenor: Dr. Emma Widdis (Slavonic Studies)
No historian of cinema would deny the significance of Russian and Soviet film, or its influence on the development of world cinema; and no student of Russian culture would deny the interest of film, or its relevance to an understanding of twentieth-century history. Eisenstein, Vertov, Tarkovsky, Sokurov: these are only the best-known names in a rich and diverse century of film-making. With its roots in the pre-revolutionary era, cinema was rapidly harnessed by the young Soviet state in 1917 as a key propaganda weapon, a means of communicating with a vast and largely illiterate population. Urgent political imperatives gave birth to innovative techniques, as revolutionary young directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov experimented with the communicative powers of the visual image. Alongside such revolutionary classics, however, the Soviet audience also relished popular comedies and melodramas that are still unfamiliar to the Western audience. In this course, we will trace the development of Russian and Soviet cinema in all its aspects, studying the 'classics' of Eisenstein and Tarkovskii alongside more popular cinema. We will see how Stalinist Socialist Realism found its paradoxical parallel in Hollywood style musical comedy, and follow the story through the 'New Wave' of the Thaw period, into the Glasnost years and up to the present day. Each week will be based around the viewing and discussion of two or three indicative film texts; in each case we will consider the changing social and political context alongside the stylistic and thematic innovations represented by particular films.

RS5: East European Memory Studies (Dr Alexander Etkind)
Memory studies have become a major topic of study in the humanities and social sciences but their empirical focus has been largely, if not exclusively, on ‘western’ societies. This seminar has a double objective. First, this seminar sets out to map how historical and psychological vectors of memory have shaped cultures, societies, and politics in post-communist Eastern Europe. Furthermore, this seminar will develop a conceptually innovative methodological focus and will define the theoretical blueprint of this emerging sub-discipline. The diversity of national self-images, cultural policies, and international relations across Eastern Europe can be largely explained by different beliefs about historic events involving large-scale human suffering. The destruction of social elites, urban spaces, and ethnic groups caused divided memories of victimhood but also desires for vengeance and retribution. The public memory of these twentieth-century traumas mediates the variety of ways in which nations develop in the post-socialist space.

RS7(MUS): Russian Opera and the State. Convenor: Dr Bill Quillen (Music)
This course explores the intersections between Russian opera and Russian history from the 1830s to the present.  In particular, we will examine the creation, production, and critical reception of opera in Russia in light of Russia’s cultural, social, and political history.  Some of the operas we will focus upon as case studies include Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836), Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1869, rev. 1872), and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1932).  We will also study the operatic landscape in Russia today, from controversies surrounding the restaging of classic works to debates about the creation of new pieces for Russia’s most hallowed stages (e.g., Desyatnikov’s 2005 opera Rosenthal’s Children, premiered at the Bolshoi and with a libretto by Vladimir Sorokin).  This course is open to all students regardless of musical background; while we will read about, listen to, and watch opera intensively, students need not be able to read music.

RS8(HOA): Questions of Identity in Russian Painting, 1757-1881. Convenor: Dr R.P. Blakesley (History of Art)
This course will examine the development of Russian painting from the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg in 1757, to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The Academy was modelled on the French Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, and emulated many Western European practices in its pedagogic programme. Yet by the nineteenth century, there was a growing concern to identify and foster a distinctly Russian school of painting. The course will consider the complex dynamic which ensued by focusing on artists such as the great eighteenth-century portraitists; the Academy protégés Ivanov and Bryullov; Venetsianov and his School; Fedotov and the early satirists; and the Peredvizhniki. By addressing the work of these and other painters in the light of contemporary social, political and literary developments, the course will trace a complex pattern of shifting priorities during which issues of national and local identity developed alongside continuing interest in academic and Western European art. A reading knowledge of Italian and French is advantageous, and reading knowledge of Russian is advised.

RS/HIST Russia and the West 1700-1917 (Dr Hubertus Jahn)
Since the reforms of Peter the Great, the relationship between Russia and the West has been a constant point of reference in Russian politics, society and culture. It was closely linked to the development of and the struggle about a Russian national identity and it had profound effects on the modernization of the country (or the lack thereof). Starting with Peters reign and his introduction of Western ways, this course option will examine European influences in Russia until the Revolution of 1917 by focusing on such divers issues as architecture, philosophy and ideology, literature, art, music and mass culture. It will consider political reforms, revolutionary and reactionary movements, social transformation, imperial symbolism, national stereotypes and nationalism. By implication, any study of foreign influences will also highlight native peculiarities. This course therefore provides a solid base for further study of imperial Russian history. A reading knowledge of Russian and German or French is desirable.

RESEARCH SEMINARS

MPhil students are expected to attend all Departmental Research Seminars and Lectures, as well as relevant CamCREES and CRASSH Research Seminars. Information about all these is available on the Department webpage.