ENG 494/598; SLC 494/498/598; POS 494; GCU 494/598; REL 494/598

Stalinism in European Literature and Film

SPRING semester

 

stalin 

Syllabus

Course Reading List

Course Film Listing

To understand the cultural sphere and the order of things in the former Soviet Union and in Central Eastern Europe after WWII, we need to examine the politics and ideology that led to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and to focus on the cultural aspects of the early twentieth century. We will then analyze the Stalinist era and we will take a closer look at the countries of the Communist block, a region viewed as monolithic in spite of its cultural past and religious diversity. Its complexity, which opens a new area of study, complicates our theoretical sophistication and invites an openness to dialogue across academic specializations, from literature and literary theory and criticism through anthropology, political science, religious studies, history and sociology, to the plastic and performing arts, to gender studies and cultural geography. Above all, it proves the growing need to cross academic disciplines and engage in discursive “contact zones.”