The Russian Roots of Terrorism

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course is team–taught in English to bring together history and fiction as a way to understand Russian terrorism. The topic in terms of both Poetics and History and Political thought entails a two-fold benefit for students. On the one hand, the students will see the historical background for mental and ethical premises all-too relevant today for the world as a whole, audacious as these premises may seem or be. On the other hand, given the importance of the history of Terrorism as ideology, they will also learn what Poetics, the specifically artistic discourse, can convey about a political mentality which they may otherwise find not merely unbearable but incomprehensible even in purely mental terms. Fiction, after all, is capable to convey the ineffable and to model the incomprehensible as no other discourse can.