20th cent. Lit course "Women in Russian Lit"

[Rebecca Jane Stanton]

Dear Julia,

I'll throw my hat into the ring with some very, very perfunctory 
thoughts to which I'm sure others will add and which they may wish to 
debate or elaborate upon...

First, about the "theoretical perspective," by which I imagine you mean 
an idea that nominally unifies the syllabus for the purposes of 
describing it in, say, a course catalogue: 20th-century Russia lends 
itself particularly nicely to this kind of inquiry because a "conscious" 
reconfiguration of gender roles was such an important part of official 
Soviet aesthetics, i.e. Socialist Realism, and literature worked 
actively on this problem of what the role (or roles) of women in modern 
life would/should look like.  It seems to me that you can -- without 
throwing around too much heavy theory too early on in the game -- pitch 
the course as a literary investigation into this ongoing conversation 
about how the Revolution, and the subsequently evolving society, 
changed, was supposed to change, or might have changed, the lives of 
women.  The recent "Art and Propaganda" exhibition at the German 
Historical Museum in Berlin had a room devoted to "The Individual and 
Society" that was replete with images and sculptures richly illustrating 
the "place" envisioned for women in interwar Russian, German, Italian 
and American society
-- quicktime virtual-reality panorama here:
http://www.dhm.de/pano/showpano.php?p=kunst-und-propaganda/Mensch01
(The index page for the whole exhibition, which I can't recommend highly 
enough, is here:
http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/kunst-und-propaganda/english/einleitung.html 
)

Second, about specific works; again, this is very off-the-cuff but 
perhaps will serve as fuel for further discussion/ elaboration.  And of 
course it all depends what you want to emphasize -- aesthetics, 
politics, history, one period versus another, etc. 

-- in addition to the female authors you already mentioned, how about 
Akhmadulina, Tolstaya, Petrushevskaya, Ulitskaya?  (For some reason the 
first names that come to mind for me are primarily either poets or 
late-/post-Soviet writers.)

-- if you plan to subject the students to Socialist Realism or its early 
models, Gladkov's "Cement" is particularly rich in female characters who 
force the "normative" male character, Gleb, to reconfigure his worldview 
quite radically.  That is, there's a lot of active, if not necessarily 
productive, thinking about what the heck women are supposed to be or 
"mean" in the society that postcedes the Civil War.

-- no survey of 20th-century Russian lit. is complete without some 
example of camp literature, and you could use (all or parts of) Evgeniia 
Ginzburg's "Krutoi marshrut" for this.  (You could even juxtapose it 
with "Ivan Denisovich" if you need the "draw" of Solzhenitsyn's name for 
craven marketing purposes, and there is some intellectual value to this 
proposition as well since the all-male universe Solzhenitsyn depicts is 
a deeply problematic one -- not just for that reason, of course.)

-- finally, the female characters in Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" 
and Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" serve as active and busy counterparts 
to passive, rather helpless male heroes, and both novels also happen to 
be somewhat radical rewritings of the eternal 19th-century "adulteress" 
plot, as well as monuments of 20th-century Russian literature in their 
own right.  I would definitely include those.

all the best,
RJS

-- 
Rebecca Stanton
Assistant Professor of Russian
Dept. of Slavic Languages
Barnard College, Columbia University
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027

(212) 854-3133
http://www.columbia.edu/~rjs19 


trubikhina at AOL.COM wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
>I am wondering if you could offer me some pragmatic and helpful suggestions. This summer I am working to develop an undergraduate course called "Women in Russian Literature." The specifics of our situation is that this is the only way at present time that we can quickly get a course in 20th-century Russian Literature that we sorely need through curriculum committees (it already exists on the books) and also enroll it (by cross-listing with Women Studies and English). 
>Therefore, we have a double goal: there should be a women studies component to it BUT PRIMARILY it should be a course in 20th-century Russian Literature.  Women can be both authors (I am certainly planning to include Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, and Gippius) and characters/subject/conceptual focus, which makes it easier to include the most important 20th-century male authors. 
>
>I was wondering if you could help me by offering suggestions 
>a) about the specific texts/authors to use (other than the three women authors mentioned above) that would be both the highlights of 20th-century R.Lit. and/or have important women characters/protagonists (OR concept of femininity at the work’s center, like, e.g., Blok’s Russia=eternal femininity concept).
>b) a theoretical perspective that a course aimed at fulfilling such a dual purpose could use.
>
>I will be grateful for and looking forward to all suggestions, on or off the list,
>
>Julia
>  
>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------