Courses

We live in an image-saturated world. How do we make sense of the moving image and its powerful roles in shaping culture and mediating our relationship with the world? This course will equip students with the tools to understand and decipher film language. It introduces and interrogates the basic notions, technologies, terminologies, and theories of film analysis. We will study visual and compositional elements, like mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Films we discuss will include different geographies, genres, major directors, schools, and film movements. Through writing, students will learn to analyze films with accurate, medium-specific vocabulary, develop informed and nuanced arguments, and critically reflect on the position of the viewer.

Full details for COML 1104 - FWS: Reading Films

What do Frankenstein and Things Fall Apart have in common? What lies behind the fantastical stories of Aladdin? Do we have to like Garcia Márquez and Shakespeare? These texts and authors re-imagine the human experience at its most intriguing level. In this course, we will discuss human rights, intimacy, joy, isolation, and other controversies at the heart of these books. Throughout the semester, students will learn how to articulate an informed and nuanced position on these issues via formal practices in analytical readings, drafting, peer review, and self-editing. Actual selection of readings may vary depending on the instructor's focus.

Full details for COML 1105 - FWS: Books with Big Ideas

In 2015, Japan's SoftBank Robotics Corporation announced the world's first robot with feelings. Many people were excited, many more disturbed. If robots are simply, as the dictionary suggests, machines "designed to function in the place of a living agent," then what is so disturbing about them? Since robots are designed to replace human labor (first economic, and now also emotional), do they represent a threat as much as they do an aid? What happens when robots exceed their purpose, and become more humanlike? How do robots read, write, and feel? How do the activities of coding and writing, or decoding and reading differ? Students will be equipped with the vocabulary and writing strategies to rigorously analyze, compare, and debate the meaning of robots in the human imagination from different epochs, countries, languages, and media. In doing so, they will write in a variety of registers about works such as the play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, who invented the term "robot". Other materials may include philosophical texts, fiction, videogames, films, graphic novels, and hip-hop concept albums.

Full details for COML 1106 - FWS: Robots

In this course, we will read works of literary, cultural, music, art, and film criticism aimed at a popular audience, from a range of magazines and other publications. We will discuss what makes a successful work of criticism, why we read criticism, and how criticism has changed over time. All readings will be essay length, by authors including George Orwell, Zadie Smith, and Joan Didion. Writing assignments will include analysis of works of criticism and then criticism in practice, when you apply what we have learned and write and revise a critical essay on a topic of your choice. 

Full details for COML 1139 - FWS: The Art of Criticism

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

Full details for COML 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

Could a meter have a meaning? Could there be a reason for a rhyme? And what is lost and gained in translation? We'll consider such questions in this introduction to poetry. We'll see how poems are put together and we'll learn how to figure them out. Poets may include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Hayden, Frank O'Hara, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Anna Akhmatova. All reading is in English.

Full details for COML 2050 - Introduction to Poetry

This course will explore how in the body of world literature humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning.  Spanning from ancient epic and origin myths through nineteenth century novels and colonial narratives to contemporary science fiction, we will inquire, through our reading: what is a world?  How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world and deconstruct or undo worlds?  Readings will range widely across time and world space (with authors such as Hesiod, Balzac, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Bacigalupi) and will include attention to contemporary theories of world literature.

Full details for COML 2271 - Reading for the End of Time

This course explores Asian speculative literary fiction and cinema including early mythological influences, science fiction, and contemporary discourses of technoscientific progress. Students will examine the historical development of the broad genres in their specific contexts; the conceptual relations between realism, science, fantasy, and speculation; and ultimately, question past and future understandings of "Asia" as speculative.

Full details for COML 2282 - Speculative Asias

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Full details for COML 2703 - Thinking Media

The medieval past often returns in modern media with a critical twist. This course explores the imagination of the Middle Ages in modern films, video games, and other popular media. It introduces classic medieval films (Dreyer, Bergman, Buñuel), theories of medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Eco), and recent tabletop and video games from the German-speaking world and beyond. Working primarily with visual and interactive materials, we will discuss questions of aesthetics, identity, and representation; the dialectics of tradition and innovation; and the mobilization of the past in service of the present.

Full details for COML 3113 - Imagining the Middle Ages: Films, Games, and Media

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history.

Full details for COML 3262 - Global Cinema II

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, Spanish, and German leftist political figures like Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Dolores Ibarrui, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? What is the political utility of autobiographies like these? With special attention to the question of gender, ethnicity, religion, and race.

Full details for COML 3389 - The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called "city films," combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of "knowing" a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for COML 3485 - Cinematic Cities

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled "The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming." This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka).   Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today's world ("what they knew") as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

Full details for COML 3541 - Introduction to Critical Theory

"My existence is a scandal," Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of "art for art's sake" and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or obscene, the Decadent writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, A. C. Swinburne, and especially Oscar Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, and design.

Full details for COML 3550 - Decadence

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of the "general will" in his classic text The Social Contract, he made what was then an unprecedented and scandalous claim: that the people as a whole, and not an individual agent, could be the subject of political will and self-determination. This claim was all the more revolutionary in that historically "the people" [ie peuple] named those poor masses who had no political representation, and who were subjects of the state only to the extent that they were subject to the will of a sovereign monarch. What then is "the people," and how is it constituted as a collective subject? How does a people speak, or make its will known? Can that will be represented or institutionalized? Do all people belong to the people? How inclusive is the social contract? This course will examine crucial moments in the constitution of the people from the French Revolution to the present day, considering the crisis of political representation they have alternately exposed or engendered and the forms of the social contract to which they have given rise. Our discussions will range from major political events (the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, colonialism and decolonization, May '68) to contemporary debates around universalism, secularism, immigration, and "marriage for all". Readings by Rousseau, Robespierre, L'Ouverture, Michelet, Marx, Freud, Arendt, Balibar, and Rancière.

Full details for COML 3780 - What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

Full details for COML 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China's borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English. 

Full details for COML 3985 - Literature of Leaving China

For critical theory, the nation and nationalism have always been vexed issues. How to consider the relation of the nation and capital? Is the nation merely an institution that serves to ideologically ground the labour market? Is it merely an apparatus to regulate and segment the "bearers" and "guardians" of labour power, and guide them to the sphere of exchange? Is it a real reflection of division amongst peoples? Is it an ancient entity, on par with the state, which persists into the modern era? And what should be the clarification of how the nation functions within the cycle of reproduction, in which capitalism must interact with elements exterior to its own cyclical movement in order to guarantee its social basis and persistence? In taking up the long history of theorizations of the nation and nationalism in the general orbit of contemporary theory, we will attempt to gain a holistic theoretical assessment of the limits and possibilities of this field of criticism.

Full details for COML 4110 - The National Question: Theory and Critique

COML 4190 and COML 4200 may be taken independently of each other. Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for COML 4200 - Independent Study

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for COML 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

This course will begin with some of the earliest theoretical works on personal and historical trauma and pass through several traditions of interpretation (French, American, etc.). Then we will move to more recent attempts to rethink the theory of trauma as it crosses cultural and linguistic borders outside of Europe and the US. Among other questions we will consider the relations among personal, collective, and political trauma and address the imperatives and challenges of thinking trauma in a global context.

Full details for COML 4452 - Trauma Across Borders

The environmental humanities pose a radically different set of questions to texts, materials, and contexts that were previously approached in terms of human intentions and actions alone. This seminar explores the theoretical and methodological potentials of this rapidly emerging and constantly evolving field from the interdisciplinary, comparative perspective that it also axiomatically demands. Together we will discuss seminal works that tackle four foundational concepts imperative for reframing the traditional concerns of the humanities under the sign of anthropogenic planetary change -- scale, form, matter/ energy, and distribution. The seminar will develop ways to configure these focal points to the theoretical and practical concerns of various disciplinary approaches and, especially, to participants' individual interests and research projects.

Full details for COML 4902 - Environmental Humanities: Theories and Methods

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester. A letter grade is awarded on completion of the second semester, COML 4940.

Full details for COML 4930 - Senior Essay

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester.

Full details for COML 4940 - Senior Essay

Interrogating the notion of the margins, this class will explore works of contemporary Arabic literature that represent voices marginalized within the Arabic-speaking communities in which they are produced. We will particularly focus on analyzing works that give voice to ethnic or religious minorities, or those marginalized because of their gender, sexuality, or race. We will also examine recent scholarship that seeks to understand the marginalized field of Arabic literature through the lens of World Literature. Students may read the texts in Arabic or in translation.

Full details for COML 6124 - Arabic Literature from the Margins

This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for COML 6200 - Independent Study

How does psychoanalysis conceive the human, and what does it offer humanity at the crossroads where we find ourselves today? These questions animate the work of Haitian-Quebecois psychoanalyst Willy Apollon, who in recent years has developed the Freudian metapsychology away from its traditional focus on neurosis, the ego, and Oedipus Complex. Apollon advances that the clash of different civilizations that is so ubiquitous today attests not only to their decline, but to the emergence of something that transcends all civilizations. Beyond the man and the woman that cultureproduces to assure its own reproduction, or the specific iteration of the human that each civilization promotes as superior to all the others, he argues that pyschoanalysis must place itself in the service of this (re)emergent humanity. Works studied include Freud, Fanon, Lacan and Safouan as well as recent scholarship by Lucie Cantin, Sheldon George, and Ranjana Khanna.

Full details for COML 6250 - Psychoanalysis and the Human

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general  horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for COML 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

This course will begin with some of the earliest theoretical works on personal and historical trauma and pass through several traditions of interpretation (French, American, etc.). Then we will move to more recent attempts to rethink the theory of trauma as it crosses cultural and linguistic borders outside of Europe and the US. Among other questions we will consider the relations among personal, collective, and political trauma and address the imperatives and challenges of thinking trauma in a global context.

Full details for COML 6452 - Trauma Across Borders

This course is intended to familiarize graduate students with the intellectual history, background, and development of Marxist theory in relation to the contemporary literary and cultural-theoretical landscape. As the broad field through which numerous other directions in theory and research were formed, a knowledge of the Marxist tradition remains an essential backdrop to later developments – the analysis of modes of production, the sociology of labour, the politics of class formation, the developments and trends of postcolonial studies, the modern and contemporary forms of social thought, numerous currents of political thought, and so on. This course therefore fills a need for graduate students to familiarize themselves not only with the work of Marx, but also with central debates in twentieth century and postwar social theory. Rather than examine the work of major figures of the history of socialism as a political tendency, we will focus on the history of theoretical research in the Marxist tradition, with the goal of preparing students to critically apprehend the intellectual history of the principal debates, the major figures, and developments of this tradition in a broad and inclusive sense.

Full details for COML 6490 - Marx and Contemporary Theory

To hone our skills in the analysis of topics in Asian studies, we will review critically a number of switchpoints that have produced conceptual difference in recent scholarly work. Asia scholars have laid claim to the historical, to modernity, coloniality, postcoloniality, religion, affect, temporality, race, capital, (mass) media, embodiment, the translocal, and the posthuman as the bases for producing conceptual difference. Each of these switchpoints has allowed for valuable interventions from Asian Studies into the humanities and social sciences. We will develop questions, criteria, and critiques to thoroughly test our tools of analysis and work toward yet other methods. Contemporary academia valorizes the production of conceptual difference. Thus, evaluation criteria routinely include originality and innovation. This is a valuable point of departure that allows us to ask, What kind of conceptual difference do we want to produce in our work? What kind of conceptual difference is intellectually rigorous? Asia as Question does not merely provide intellectual history but rather tests out—and creates—contemporary, critical approaches. As such, it interrogates especially notions of region and area; work on temporality; new ontologies; and current approaches to media ecologies. 

Full details for COML 6622 - Asia as Question

The history of systems theory involves complex stories of technoscientific change and knowledge production on a global scale. In recent years, scholars have increasingly moved away from the field's predominantly North American and European focuses to study instead how systems theory's thinking of dynamic interrelations, and the related area of cybernetics research on self-organization and recursivity have developed in major Asian societies. This course first explores the epistemological foundations of systems theory before studying its major developments and historical case studies in the PRC, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. We will then examine systems theory and cybernetics' impacts on questions of technocratic governance, biopolitics, economy, gender and sexuality, and cultural and aesthetic production.

Full details for COML 6681 - Systems Theory and Asia Critique

Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China's borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English.

Full details for COML 6685 - Literature of Leaving China

The environmental humanities pose a radically different set of questions to texts, materials, and contexts that were previously approached in terms of human intentions and actions alone. This seminar explores the theoretical and methodological potentials of this rapidly emerging and constantly evolving field from the interdisciplinary, comparative perspective that it also axiomatically demands. Together we will discuss seminal works that tackle four foundational concepts imperative for reframing the traditional concerns of the humanities under the sign of anthropogenic planetary change -- scale, form, matter/ energy, and distribution. The seminar will develop ways to configure these focal points to the theoretical and practical concerns of various disciplinary approaches and, especially, to participants' individual interests and research projects.

Full details for COML 6902 - Environmental Humanities: Theories and Methods

New forms of German literature emerged in the wake of transnational labor migration, especially after 1989. Taking leave of a sociological model that interprets this literature only in terms of intercultural dialogue, this course juxtaposes prose fiction about cultural contact and critical theories of difference with two primary goals in mind. Students will be introduced to representative examples of contemporary German literatures of migration, and critical modes of conceptualizing cultural contact in Germany will be compared in relation to each other and in tension with the literary field. Focus on German literature of Turkish migration complemented by readings reflecting other transnational phenomena such as postsocialism, postcolonialism, globalization, refugees, world literature.

Full details for COML 6960 - Rites of Contact: Emergent German Literatures and Critical Method

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is among the greatest of Russian writers and a central figure in Russian culture. In a short life – he was killed in a duel at 37 – he wrote in a wide variety of forms. He is best known as a poet, but his fiction marks the beginning of the Russian novel; to understand Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, we need to read Pushkin. Among the fictions we will read are stories, including the Tales of Belkin and "The Queen of Spades," the short novel The Captain's Daughter, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, and the historical novel about the author's African ancestor, The Moor of Peter the Great. We will also read selected short poems.

Full details for RUSSL 3351 - Pushkin's Fictions

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, Spanish, and German leftist political figures like Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Dolores Ibarrui, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? What is the political utility of autobiographies like these? With special attention to the question of gender, ethnicity, religion, and race.

Full details for RUSSL 3389 - The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth

Tolstoy is impossible. An aristocrat who renounced the privileges of wealth and rank. A man of titanic appetites who repudiated meat, alcohol and sex. A Christian who did not believe in God and tried to rewrite the Gospels. An anarchist who ruled his estate like an ancient patriarch. A writer of genius who thought literature was evil and a waste of time and referred to his greatest novel as "garbage." A pacifist who described the frontline experience of soldiers in the most careful, loving detail. In Tolstoy's imaginative universe, we may find the origin of contemporary conflicts and anxieties about money, about love and about power. But Tolstoy's modern consciousness was not made in Paris or New York - Tolstoy was made in late imperial Russia, notoriously the least modern country in nineteenth century Europe. How, then, did Tolstoy happen? How can we account historically for the contradictions that informed his epic project of self-fashioning? In this seminar, we will see Tolstoy at work in his single-handed creation of a counter-culture at war with the social and political currents of his time - and of ours.

Full details for RUSSL 4172 - Tolstoy: History and Counter-Culture

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for RUSSL 4492 - Supervised Reading in Russian Literature

Independent study.

Full details for RUSSL 6611 - Supervised Reading and Research

Reinforces the speaking skills learned in RUSSA 1122.  Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computer. Class meeting times will be chosen at the organizational meeting (usually the second or third day of the semester) so as to accommodate as many students as possible. The time and place of the organizational meeting will be announced at russian.cornell.edu

Full details for RUSSA 1104 - Conversation Practice

Gives a thorough grounding in all the language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Course materials include clips from original Russian films and television programs. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computers. Note the RUSSA 1104 option. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1122 - Elementary Russian Through Film

The emphasis is on reading unabridged articles on a variety of topics from current Russian web pages and translating them into English; a certain amount of discussion (in Russian) may also be undertaken. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1126 - Reading Russian Press

RUSSA 1131 and RUSSA 1132 cover the standard Cornell first-year Russian language curriculum at a slower pace than RUSSA 1103 -RUSSA 1104 and RUSSA 1121 -RUSSA 1122, the pace to be chosen by each individual student in consultation with the instructor. Somewhat larger homework reading, writing, and online assignments with fewer and shorter meetings with the instructors in very small groups. Detailed description on the Russian Language Program website.

Full details for RUSSA 1132 - Self-Paced Elementary Russian II

Guided conversation, translation, reading, pronunciation, and grammar review, emphasizing the development of accurate and idiomatic expression in the language. Course materials include video clips from an original Russian feature film and work with Russian web sites, in addition to the textbook. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 2204 - Intermediate Composition and Conversation

Taught on a specialized basis for students with special projects (e.g., to supplement a non-language course or thesis work).

Full details for RUSSA 3300 - Directed Studies

Reading, writing, and conversation: current Russian films (feature and documentary), newspapers, television programs, Russian web sites, and other materials are used. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3304 - Advanced Composition and Conversation

Involves discussion, in Russian, of authentic Russian texts and films (feature or documentary) in a variety of non-literary styles and genres. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 4414 - Modern Russia: Past and Present II

By the end of this course, students will be able to carry on basic conversations in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian on many topics from daily life. They should be able to make polite requests, ask for information, respond to requests and descriptions, impart personal information, and have simple discussions on familiar topics. They will also acquire the skills to read and understand simple informational texts, such as newspaper headlines and menus, announcements and advertisements, and to extract the general idea of longer informational texts. They will master the writing systems of the languages, and should be able to write notes or simple letters and keep a journal.

Full details for BCS 1132 - Elementary Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian II

The intermediate course in BCS is a continuation of the elementary course and is intended to enhance overall communicative competence in the language. This course moves forward from the study of the fundamental systems and vocabulary of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian to rich exposure to the spoken and written language with the wide range of speakers and situations. The goal of the course is to give students practice in comprehension, speaking, and composition, while broadening their vocabulary and deepening their understanding of grammar and syntax. The course will focus on the following skills: conversation, writing, role-playing, interviewing, and summarizing. To develop these skills the students will be assigned dialogues, language exercises, translations, descriptions, summaries, and a final independent project.

Full details for BCS 2134 - Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian II

The goal of the advanced course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language is to help students improve their high-immediate or advanced proficiency in BCS. The course focuses on the colloquial, literary (as well as scholarly) idiom, primarily by developing students' ability to read authentic literary and journalistic texts and speak and write about them in BCS.

Full details for BCS 3134 - Advanced Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian II

The Intermediate Finnish II course is designed for students with some prior knowledge of Finnish. Students have an opportunity to practice listening, reading, writing and speaking in Finnish. Students learn to provide information about their opinions and feelings, their families, their immediate environment and their daily activities. The course is taught in Finnish.

Full details for FINN 2134 - Intermediate Finnish II

The course offers a general overview of the geography, history, literature, cinema, fine arts, music, and language of this Eastern European country of some 40 million people. At various historical periods since the 18th century, Ukraine had been controlled by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, gained independence in 1991, and become the target of a military invasion by Russian Federation in 2022. Through assigned readings, videos, and other materials, students will gain a degree of understanding of the historical and social forces that shape Ukrainian everyday life, natural environments, and popular culture, and its current place in Europe and the world.

Full details for UKRAN 1100 - Introduction to the Geography, History, Culture, and Language of Ukraine

This course teaches language as a gateway to Ukrainian literature, history, and arts and the means of communication in everyday life, offering thorough grounding in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Full details for UKRAN 1122 - Elementary Ukrainian II

The course starts with a review and subsequent reinforcement of grammar fundamentals and core vocabulary pertaining to the most common aspects of daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of students' communicative skills (oral and written) on such topics as the self, family, studies and leisure, travel, meals and others.

Full details for UKRAN 2134 - Intermediate Ukrainian II

This course offers a close look at the language and culture in independent Ukraine: Western vs. Slavic linguistic heritage, Internet styles, Russian vis-a-vis Ukrainian influence, and more. Mileposts of the 20th and the 21st centuries are discussed in depth. This is not a course in history or government; the recent complex (often cataclysmic) events in Ukraine are investigated in the context of the everyday life of our contemporaries. How have Ukrainians pursued self-determination through culture and language after decades of oppression and control? The course is taught by a recent refugee from the Ukrainian war who is especially interested in Ukraine's new role on the world stage. Why the yellow-and-blue flags and bumper stickers in our streets and parking lots?

Full details for UKRAN 2200 - Ukraine's Culture and Language within the Legacy of the USSR, Russian Invasion, and Other Crises

This content-based modular course aims to develop students' capacity to use the Ukrainian language as a research and communication tool in a variety of specialized functional and stylistic areas that include literary fiction, scholarly prose, printed and broadcast journalism. It is designed for students with interest in the history, politics, literature, culture and other aspects of contemporary Ukraine, as well as those who plan to do their research, business or reporting about Ukraine.

Full details for UKRAN 3134 - Advanced Ukrainian II

Intended for students who speak more or less standard Ukrainian but have only beginner's understanding of Ukrainian grammar and have not learned to read or write in Ukrainian well (or have not learned written Ukrainian at all). May be taught slightly faster or slower in a given year, depending on the needs and interests of the students. Two classes a week teach writing and grammar and related reading. These classes are required, and the students who take them receive 2 credit hours. The third (optional) class teaches reading and discussion, focusing on contemporary styles.

Full details for UKRAN 3305 - Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Ukrainian