04/03/2025
n Summer Session I we offer an Online Asynchronous LLEA 354 course "Russia: Faces of Asia" (DL, CRN 92856). Wiswel scholarship available for eligible students (Junior or Senior, 3.0 GPA). Sign up here https://www.sis.hawaii.edu/uhdad/avail.classes?i=MAN&t=202540&s=LLEA. Here is the course description: The multifaceted and complex image of Asia in Russian literature and visual culture through the last 200 years has evolved, defined by political events: the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, their inclusion as part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and then the creation of independent states. Embracing the issue of Orientalism, the notion of Central Asia, the postcolonial theory, the idea of the internal colonization and the question of post-Soviet identities, the course traces Orientalism, dominating, for example, in the ‘Caucasus text’ in Russian Romantic literature of that epoch as the most persistent discourse in depicting “Russian” Asia to this day. Faces of Asia synthesizes the connotations of Asia in Russian literature and culture from the first Orientalist works through hybridization processes, when literature reflects a gradual turn from Orientalism to Assimilation, a turn favored by multinational nature of Soviet literature and culture when "national" writers (artists and filmmakers) emerge and thrive alongside ethnic Russian authors, to the collapse of the USSR and the Post-Soviet trauma. In the middle of the course, we will zoom out to take a view of Russian literature and culture in the global Asian contexts: we will discover the continuing impact of the Mongol invasion; we will travel to India vicariously through a Russian artist’s diary and contemplate his hypnotic paintings of the Himalaya mountains; we will also explore cross-pollinations between Russian and Japanese arts of painting, woodblock prints, literature and cinema. Please help share the info.
