Classes Taught

Modernity in the Visual Arts

Romanian Modern Art Presentation

Stalinism in Literature and Film

An interdiciplinary approach to issues relating to the Soviet Empire and Communist Gulag, Stalinist tactics, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Prague Spring and the totalitarian regimes of the countries of Central Eastern Europe before and after the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution an the ensuing proletarian dictatorship.

stalin

 

Societies and Cultures in Modern Europe

The readings in this course examine the politics and ideology that led to the fall of the regions' empires; the rise of nationalism; the triumph of the Bolshevic Revolution and the ensuing proletarian dictatorship; and the questions one feels compelled to ask in dealing with post-war totalitariansim and the emerging democracies of the newest members of the European Union.

 

Elementary Romanian
Studying Romanian will give you access to the culture of a facinating place in the heartland of Europe, to a country with interesting people and a rich history, medieval cities with crooked cobblestone streets, painted monasteries, and the thick forests of the Carpathian Mountains. 
Bran Castle
Intermediate Romanian
Interested in accelerating your language study?  For additional credit, intensive summer session courses will be offered at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, the capital city of Transylvania and former site of a Roman castrum.
Women Against the State:  "The Second Sex" in Pre/Post-Communist Europe (498/598).  As a tongue-in-cheek play on Simone de Beauvoir's controversial study, this course proposes to discuss the works of 20th-century writers in Central Eastern Europe that emphasize problematic issues of women's lives in communist regimes.
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Literature and Politics in Pre/Post Communist Europe. (498/598)
This course will focus on the four decades of totalitarianism and on the literature following the 1989 collapse of Communism.  Reading selections will include political fiction from Joseph Conrad's historical fiction to Solzhenitsyn's fictional histories.  We will also consider the various "-isms" of the period, from hardcore Stalinism to socialist realism.

Literature and Culture in Central Eastern Europe (394). This course will explore the literature of pre and post-totalitarian Europe, with selections from Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, and Havel, among others.
Ionesco
Literature and Film in Pre/Post Communist Europe (498/598).
Since dictatorships usually reject any kind of unorthodox behavior and art, the four decades of totalitarianism explored a wide variety of subversive formulas, even radical experiments in the implicit political significance of a creative dissidence in film.  We will thus view and discuss the rhetoric of movies and their relation to literature:  one setting forth the image, the other using the word to convey their respective reality.
Special Topics Seminar: Henry James and the Decadent Fin-de-Siecle (345). Along with representative works by James, the reading list includes selected works by DuMaurier, Wells, Wilde, and Pater. Also discussions focusing on aestheticism as a precursor to high modernity. 
book
The American Novel (332). This study of major American fiction in the second half of the 19th-century and the first half of the 20th-century documents the American novel in its social and historical context and as an expression of narrative theory.
American Literature Survey Course (341 and 342).

Writing about Literature (218).
This course emphasizes both the reading of and the writing about a variety of literary texts while addressing the rhetorical and critical strategies writing about literature requires.

American Short Stories (352).Works from the so called "classic tradition," many of which emphasize historical and cultural diversity. 

TS Eliot
History of Literary Criticism (I and II). Major critics and critical traditions in the Western world from antiquity to pre-modern, and from early-modern to modernity, with an emphasis on Romanian schools of thought. (University of
Bucharest).

World Literature (I and II). A comparative literature course offered to graduate and undergraduate students. Selections from the great literature of the world in translations and lectures on the cultural background. 

Survey of English Literature (222).
The focus is on how to present information in clear cogent prose.  I require eight writing assignments, a mid-term, a final, and a short office conference with each student to review the final draft for each final writing assignment.
History of the Drama (355). Nature and characteristics of dramatic expressions from Greek to medieval, from early-modern to modern periods.
Ovid
 
Comparative Literature Survey Course (I and II). Survey of literary and artistic works, from Homer and Ovid to Rabelais (I); from Moliere to Flaubert and Thomas Mann, and from Marquez to Achebe (II). (University of
Bucharest).

English Composition and Introductory Courses in Writing.