Post-Soviet Identity Lit/Film

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The course "Transgression and Resistance" studies the most recent literature and films created in the post-Soviet space: we will read and analyze short stories (Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Jurij Bujda), poems (Maria Stepanova, Elena Fanailova, Roman Osminkin), songs (Psoy Korolenko), as well as non-fiction (Svetlana Aleksievich) and texts created collectively in the Russian segment of the Internet, and discuss how they are rooted in and react to the classical Russian and Soviet traditions. We will focus on various strategies of constructing a new Russian identity on problems of nationality and gender. The course will treat post-Soviet transgressive literature and visual arts as a form of resistance to authoritative aesthetics and political systems and discuss the phenomenon of nostalgia towards the Soviet Union and its deconstruction in contemporary culture.