Course designed for new graduate students in literature. Introduction to modern literary theory and criticism; principles of textual analysis; methods of bibliographical research.

This seminar seeks to acquaint students with various approaches to literary scholarship. Numerous methodologies, both Russian and Western, will be introduced and tested with respect to the questions they inherently pose and with respect to their applicability to Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, the primary text we will be working with over the course of the semester. Evgenii Onegin has generated vastly divergent interpretations, from Belinskii, who viewed the novel as an “encyclopedia of Russian life,” to Nabokov’s insistence that the novel and its characters were a purely literary stylization of prior European and Russian sources. These divergences point to two broadly distinct approaches to scholarship, one pointing in the direction of historicism, the other to various formalisms and structuralisms. Over the course of the semester we will be examining both historicist and formalist approaches to the text, those arising from Pushkin criticism as well as from much further afield. We will be exploring the largely thematic and socio-historical approaches typical of nineteenth-century Russian criticism; at the same time we will be asking if 20th-century scholars of the novel, such as Bakhtin, or of cultural history, such as Lotman, might serve to refine the assumptions of 19th-century criticism. We will also be examining the stylistic specificities of the text, focusing on such questions as the correlation of rhythm and syntax, or the patterning of the Onegin stanza. Throughout the semester we will also be asking how and whether we can responsibly compare Russian and Western approaches to approaches as diverse as genre theory, cultural history, intertextuality, romantic irony, gender and sexuality. Required texts: A.S. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, A.D. Briggs (editor). Duckworth Press. ISBN-13: 978-1853993961

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.