Tails from the Russian Empire: Animals in Russian and Yiddish Literatures

Catalog description

Unless you subscribe to certain extreme life philosophies, animals probably constitute some of your existence and environment - whether living with pets, hearing birds around campus, or confronting our human selves every morning, most of us would struggle to completely avoid animals in daily life. In this course, we explore different types of media and texts - though predominantly Russian and Yiddish literatures from 19th-century Russia in English translation - ventriloquizing, problematizing, and otherwise instrumentalizing non-human animals. Through our animal readings on narration and theory, we reconsider concepts of relation, humanism, sustainability, responsibility. Students can apply their refined understandings to create art pieces of digital humanities projects using the Textile Makerspace.