GERMANIC AND SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES (GSLL)

The intersection of literary fantasy with historical reality considered in two ways: (1) fantastic-looking tales based on historical reality; and (2) stories describing fantastic situations that actually came true. Previously offered as GERM 50.

Critical issues that dominated the 20th century: WWI and Bolshevik Revolution; rise of fascism, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and their roles; origins and evolution of Cold War; collapse of Eastern Bloc. Previously offered as GERM 51.

This seminar explores ecological crises and their depiction in German literature and film. The texts and films we will discuss will range from early Romantic fairy tales to present-day documentaries and climate-change literature (cli-fi). Together, we will face nuclear catastrophes, flooding, landslides, mass extinction, and climate change. Films with English subtitles; readings and discussions in English. Students may not receive credit for both GSLL 52 and GERM 255.

Introduction to pre-Christian culture of Germany, Anglo-Saxon England, and Scandinavia from the late Roman Empire through the Viking Age, as preserved in myths, sagas, charms, inscriptions, and historical documents. Previously offered as GERM 53. Students may not receive credit for both GERM 215 and GSLL 53.

Fairy tales from different national traditions and historical periods read through various critical lenses, against a backdrop of changing historical conceptions of the child. Works from Grimm, Anderson, Brontë, Disney, etc. Students may not receive credit for both GSLL 54 and GERM 279/CMPL 279. Previously offered as GERM 54.

Introduces students to study of humanities by examining how the idea of Rome evolved through poetry, history, philosophy, opera, even forgery into a concept that has long outlasted the Romans. Previously offered as GERM 55.

This course seeks to explore the historically difficult position of minorities in the modern world, using the situation of Jews in Germany from the 18th century to the Holocaust as a case study. Previously offered as GERM 56.

Stalinist Soviet Union serves as a case study to examine how dictatorships develop and how they tend to be enveloped in justifications and kept in existence by outside observers. Previously offered as GERM 59.

Students explore the international history, filmic techniques and cultural meanings of non-narrative cinema of the 20th century. Students also transform in-class discussions and individual essays into video projects. Previously offered as GERM 60.

The intersection of performance in a theater space and in everyday life will serve as a springboard to investigating the diversity of contemporary America. Examines how race, class, religion, sexuality, sexual orientation, history, and death are performed in America today. Previously offered as GERM 63.

This seminar deals with how encounters between Europe and the African Diaspora have changed notions of race, nation, identity, and belonging in the 20th century. Through engaging with diverse texts--literary, nonliterary, and visual--we will explore the construction of blackness in various national and historical contexts. Previously offered as GERM 67.

This course focuses on three powerful affective states that challenge the conception of humans as autonomous, independent beings: intensity, vitality, and ecstasy. We will examine both philosophical and artistic representations of these particular states, focusing on the way in which they both endanger and enrich our experience of the world. Previously offered as GERM 68. Honors version available.

Why is it that we cry at the movies? We will focus on the melodrama but also look at comedy and horror to think about emotional responses to films. Students will learn the basics of film analysis, gain an overview of genre cinema, and study approaches to emotion, affect, and the body.

This seminar investigates youth cultures from the 1940s to the present in the United States and around the world. It offers students a history of how different youth cultures developed over time, and consideration of how the constitution of youth cultures has been influenced by factors like race, class, and gender.

This seminar examines the influence the Bible had on great works of Western literature and traces this powerful literary tradition through different cultures and historical periods. Readings and discussions in English.

This course examines concepts and representations of underworlds in literature and the visual arts from the ancient world to the Middle Ages and Renaissance to modernity. Our journey will take us to the realms of the afterlife as well as into the abyss of the human psyche and the shady areas of underground criminal activities. We will explore how the desire to know the beyond has triggered people's imagination, inspired literary and artistic traditions.

This course explores the question of the animal in the works of major Russian writers (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Platonov). Among the topics to be discussed are: The animal as the other; animal and human natures: dominance and submission, ethics of human/animal relations, and the trope of "talking" animals. Readings and discussions in English.

Explores and reflects on the experience and significance of being a doctor in Russia and the United States, analyzing "doctors' stories" presented in fiction, nonfiction, film, and other media. Previously offered as SLAV 82.

The word "robot" was invented by Czech author Karel Capek in 1920. Science fiction has had a long-running obsession with robots. Fiction and film dream up robots who have mastered and often surpassed the strange art that is being human. In this class, we will read and watch stories about robots from East and Central Europe, with occasional detours into American culture. Films with English subtitles; readings and discussions in English.

Terror was used as a political weapon in 19th-century Russia. This seminar introduces the terrorists through their own writings and fictional representations in novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Joseph Conrad. Previously offered as SLAV 84.

Readings for this seminar include children's wartime diaries, adult memoirs of child survivors, and fiction from Central and Eastern Europe. Previously offered as SLAV 85.

The seminar considers the relationship between literature and madness through the works of major Russian writers (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Nabokov). Previously offered as SLAV 86.

What is totalitarianism? Can a portrayal of suffering, even death, under a totalitarian state, have artistic value, or must it remain only a political pamphlet? This seminar studies authors who reveal the crimes of totalitarianism, while also showing the moral strength and/or weaknesses of humans victimized by the totalitarian state.

An introduction to the region, this course examines the role of gender in central and east European literature from the end of the 19th century to contemporary times. Course materials include novels, films, historical readings, and essays. Readings and class discussions in English. Previously offered as SLAV 88H. Honors version available.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester.

This course offers a historical perspective on the adaptation of medieval culture in "Game of Thrones." We will focus on topics such as family, politics, religion, violence, gender, slavery, outcasts, knighthood, travel, heroes, myths, and magic. Readings and discussions in English.

This course draws on a variety of cultural documents to explore both the conflict and cross fertilization between the Christian and Islamic cultures of the Middle Ages. Readings and discussions in English. Previously offered as GERM 218.

This seminar covers popular and pious literature written by and for Jews in the 15th to 18th century in German-speaking countries. Originally written in Old Yiddish, this literature preserved the popular European genres and nonfiction accounts of Jewish community and family life. Previously offered as GERM 225.

Why was occupied Germany divided into two states after World War II? Were the Cold War and division inevitable? We explore these questions in two chronological contexts: 1945-1949 and 1989-present, with emphasis on the reemergence of Western conflict with Putin's Russia. Readings and discussions in English. Previously offered as GERM 254. Honors version available.

This course investigates the central role played by the "German question" in the break-up of the wartime alliance, the emergence of East-West political blocs, the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, and the return to new Russian-Western antagonisms. Readings and discussions in English. Previously offered as GERM 255.

This seminar provides students with a general introduction to Marxist thought with particular attention to its critical importance for interpreting the role of ideology in modern literature. Readings and class discussions in English. Previously taught as GSLL 251.

Central Europe, at the center of dramatic historical changes--WWI, emergence of independent nation states, WWII and Holocaust, Communism and its end, incorporation into the European Union--produced unprecedented cultural results. The creative voices of writers and filmmakers have relevance far beyond this region.

We will study how contemporary literary and cinematic works of Central European intellectuals serve as reflections on the everyday life of this region. Readings and class discussions in English. Films with English subtitles.

This course examines the roles and representations of Jews in the world of the theater from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice to the present, considering dramas, operas, musicals, film adaptations, and films. Readings and discussions in English.

A study of the role of Jews and the "Jewish question" in German culture from 1750 to the Holocaust and beyond. Discussions and texts (literary, political, theological) in English. Previously offered as GERM 270.

An examination of the vampire in the visual and verbal cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, and the popular adaptation of "vampirism" in the West. All materials and discussions in English. Previously offered as HUNG 271.

Explore the relationship between Poland, Russia, and Germany from World War II until the present day, through films and readings that cover World War II, the fall of Communism in Europe, the Holocaust and the post-war situation of Jews, religious faith, Putin's politics, women's rights, and the current refugee situation in Germany. Film directors include Balabanov, Becker, Fassbinder, Kalatozov, Holland, Mikhalkov, Polanski, Wajda, and Wenders. Readings and class discussions in English. Films with English subtitles.

Aesthetic experiment, agit-prop tool, and instrument of social critique: documentary film is a flexible form. In the Socialist Bloc, documentary was sanctioned by the state but often used to undermine state power. This course is a survey of Polish, Czech, Yugoslav and Hungarian documentary film. We will explore studio productions alongside home movies, amateur films, and art films. Does documentary simply record reality, or can it change reality too? Readings & discussions in English.

This course examines the relationship between text, music, and the visual arts, focusing on the way in which nonliterary aesthetic content may both mediate and call into question cultural values.

This course looks at cultural geography through the lens of literature about rivers. After a brief survey of the world's major rivers and a short dive into the way environmental science seeks to understand rivers, classes are devoted to poems, stories, novels, histories, and even science fiction about rivers. Students engage in mentored research culminating in a substantial essay. Readings and discussions in English.

Traces the invention of race, racism, and discourses of cultural inferiority/superiority throughout Western culture. What historical events created the necessity for racist thinking? How did colonialism and transatlantic migration change Atlantic cultures? Why did black culture become fashionable? Is the 21st century "post-racial"? Readings and course descriptions in English.

A critical look at varieties of cinematic representation and memorialization of the Holocaust, from those countries of Europe where it mostly took place. Taught in English. All films in (or subtitled in) English. Previously offered as SLAV 281.

Scholars of Afropessimism argue that we are not living in the age of post-slavery, but in the "afterlife of slavery" and that Blacks exist outside of the world, because the social world is held together by anti-Blackness. This argumentation has had important effects within Black German and Black European Studies. This course seeks to explore these philosophical claims, by comparing American films with European films that deal with anti-Black racism.

An introduction to Hungarian society and culture since the end of World War II through a selection of film classics. Films with English subtitles. Readings and discussions in English. Previously offered as HUNG 280.

This course examines cultures of dissent and protest in Central Europe, including student protests of the 1960s and the fall of Communism in 1989. Materials include literature, film, music, theatre, and popular culture from Czechoslovakia, East Germany, West Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Readings and discussions in English.

Recent years have seen a worldwide push for emancipatory acts of iconoclasm: calls to "topple" monuments as emblems of social oppression. This course examines cases of contested and demolished monuments in contexts close to home (the Carolina campus) and geographically remote (Poland, Prague). If demolishing a monument can be a violent act, how might visual objects in public space exert their own forces of violence? Readings and discussions in English.

Protest movements of 1968 are often remembered as one "planetary event." In Western Europe, protesters demanded revolution, while in Eastern Europe, protesters living under communism demanded reform. In this course, we will explore dissent and counterculture in Central Europe through the lens of 1968. Through film and fiction from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, we will investigate the impact of the Central European '68(s) worldwide. Films with English subtitles; readings and discussions in English.

We will explore the unique possibilities of comics in the form of graphic medicine: namely comics that thematize physical and mental health. How do comic artists work through issues of trauma and pain? How do artists with chronic illness and disabilities articulate their experience through comics? This course engages with the Medical Humanities, seeking to bring together students of medicine along with students of the humanities to contemplate how we communicate physical and mental illness.

This course serves as an introduction to research methodologies, theories, and the university resources available to students seeking to perform cutting-edge research in the humanities. The goal of the course is to produce a substantial research project. The capacities developed in this course as well as the project itself could be used as the basis for grants, scholarships, internship applications, or an honors thesis. Taught in English. Previously offered as CMPL 395H/GSLL 295H/ROML 295H.

Historical contexts and connections through artistic representation of the Holocaust and Soviet terror in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Taught in English; some foreign language readings for qualified students.

This course studies magical realism in Central European literature and film by placing it in a global literary/cinema context. Readings and discussions in English.

Does Central Europe exist? It is a region with shifting borders, diverse languages, and a complex history. In this course, we will explore stories that invent fictional countries in Central Europe from the mist-shrouded mountains of Wes Anderson's Zubrowka to Ursula Le Guin's invented realm of Orsinia. We will also read work by writers from within the region who mythologized their home environments. Films with English subtitles; readings and discussions in English.

This one-credit hour class aims to develop and facilitate conversational skills in a Germanic or Slavic language in the context of the current political, economic, and cultural climate. Knowledge of the language of instruction at the upper-intermediate level required.

Examines selected themes in the history, culture, society, art, and/or literature of Germanic and Slavic/East European countries.

In this course, students will carry out a research project under the direct supervision of a faculty mentor. The course culminates in a final research paper at the end of the semester.

In this course, students work through a reading list in a specific field under the direction of a faculty member. Permission of the instructor required.

Permission of the instructor. Reading knowledge of a language other than English recommended. Starting from the proposition that cultural literacy would be impossible without reliance on translations, this course addresses fundamental issues in the practice, art, and politics of literary translation. Previously offered as SLAV 560.

History and theory of international avant-garde and experimentalist movements in film, video, intermedia, multimedia, and digital formats. Content and focus may vary from semester to semester. Previously offered as GERM 683.

Permission of the director of undergraduate studies. For majors only. Reading and special studies under the direction of a faculty member.

Permission of the director of undergraduate studies. For majors only. Reading and preparation of an essay under the direction of a faculty member, designed to lead to the completion of the honors thesis.

Permission of the director of undergraduate studies. For majors only. Introduction to research techniques and preparation of an essay, designed to lead to the completion of the honors thesis.