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[contact]
post | Slavic Dept., Columbia University, 1130 Amsterdam Avenue, MC 2839, New York, NY 10027
email | rjs19@columbia.edu
face to face | Mon/Wed 9:30-10:30am, and by appointment, in 715 Hamilton Hall
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[official
interests]
modern Russian literature the long 1920s (1917-34) magic in literature auto/biography and first-person narrative poetics of place post-coloniality and ethnic studies minority literatures, especially of the Russian Far East and North |
[unofficial
interests]
[currently working on]
- a book about magic in Soviet fiction (working title Zhivago's Magpies: Magic and Modernity in Soviet Literature). Magic as theme, as trope perhaps?, as a mechanism that might even be working right there in the pages of the narrative. But most of all, magic as a kind of philosophical category, one that is always only-just “on the wrong side of the tracks,” peeking across its shared boundaries with rhetoric, with science, with religion, with politics, with art. Here's an abstract.
- a couple of articles about Odessa and the Odessan Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel, following up on my book, Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism.
- preliminary research for my next project, a book-length study (or perhaps a series of articles) on the role of writers from the "small peoples" of Russia's Far East and North in shaping Soviet and post-Soviet literature.
[currently teaching]
[other courses taught]
Russian language courses:
- Elementary Russian I and II
- Intermediate Russian I and II
- Twentieth-Century Prose Writers (a "language through content" seminar on short works of the 1920s, in Russian)
Courses in Russian literature and culture:
- Literature, Politics, and Tradition After Stalin (graduate seminar)
- A Revolution in Literature, 1917-1934 (graduate seminar)
- The Discourse of Self in Russia & the West (graduate seminar, cross-listed with Comparative Literature)
- Legacies of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union (interdisciplinary colloquium, co-taught with a social scientist; cross-listed with History and Political Science)
- Literature & Revolution (undergraduate survey of 20th century Russian literature, in English)
- Senior Seminar for Russian Majors (undergraduate thesis seminar)
- Supervised Individual Research (BA and MA level)
Comparative Literature courses:
- Race, Ethnicity, Narrative in the Russian/Soviet Empire (open to graduates and undergraduates; crosslisted with Ethnic Studies and Global Core)
- Magic and Modernity (open to graduates and undergraduates)
- Imagining the Self (undergraduate course)
First-Year Seminars and Core Curriculum
College-level courses for high school students
- Reacting to the Past: Greenwich Village, 1913. Harlem Educational Activities Fund, supported by a grant from the Teagle Foundation. Co-taught with Laurie Postlewate (Fall 2012, Fall 2013).
- What Is Great Literature? Columbia Summer Program for High School Students (2000).
[selected publications]
Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism. Northwestern University Press, 2012.
- Reviewed in:
- Selected as focus of Presidential panel, AATSEEL 2014 conference
Articles and Book Chapters:
- "Юлий Цезарь в подвале: Бабель и Шекспир." Вопросы литературы 2015:3 (May-June, 2015).
- "Reading for the Self: Unwrapping the Nested Autobiographies in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time." In Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Deborah Martinsen, Cathy Popkin, and Irina Reyfman. Academic Studies Press, 2014. Pp. 246-60.
- "'The text was considered miraculous': Magic Words in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago." Poznan Slavic Studies/Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne 4 (2013): 165–176.
- "Ekphrasis in Babel's Red Cavalry: Letters on 'A Letter.'" With Greta Matzner-Gore. Ulbandus, the Slavic Review of Columbia University 15 (2013).
- "'A Monstrous Staircase': Inscribing the Revolution of 1905 on Odessa." In Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson. Northwestern University Press, 2013. Pp. 59-80.
- "Feminine Resurrections: Gendering Redemption in the Last Novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky." In Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference, ed. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman. Slavica, 2008. Pp. 71-90.
- "From 'Underground' to 'In the Basement': How Odessa Replaced Petersburg as Capital of the Russian Literary Imagination." American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists. Vol. 2: Literature, ed. David M. Bethea. Slavica, 2008. Pp. 203–216.
- "Talking Back to Nabokov: A Commentary on a Commentary." Ulbandus, the Slavic Review of Columbia University 10 (2007): 212-221.
- "Identity Crisis: The Literary Cult and Culture of Odessa in the Early Twentieth Century." Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 57 (2003): 117-126.
- "Chichikov Dis-Coursed: Discursive Dominance and Narrative Momentum in Gogol's Dead Souls." The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 28:1 (2001, printed 2002): 197-206.
- "Isaak Babel's Great Credibility Caper." Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 15:1-2 (2001): 115-125.
For a complete list of my publications, please download my CV (PDF). |
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