Professor: Ilya Kalinin
Semester: Spring 2024 (January 29  – May 21)
Subject: LIT
Course Level: 200
Number of Bard Credits: 4 credits
Course Title: Contemporary Cultural and Literary Theories: Problematization of Canons, Decolonization of Peripheries
Max Enrollment: 22 students
Schedule: Monday – Wendesday 4.10 – 5.30 pm Berlin (UTC+2)
Distribution Area: Literary Analysis / Difference and Justice/
Cross-Listing(s): Philosophy
Language of Instruction: Russian

The course explores the evolution of theoretical ideas about culture and literature in the 20th-21st century: Russian formalism and early Soviet sociological method, M. Bakhtin and Soviet semiotics, French structuralism and American deconstruction, neo-Marxism and cultural studies of the Birmingham School, post-colonial and subaltern studies, gender and queer theories, new historicism and memory studies. Its objectives fall into two categories, the first being a general overview of the history of various schools and domains of theoretical reflection on culture in general and literature in particular. The second objective concerns the framing of this theoretical knowledge in the cultural and political context of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will be learning how to problematize cultural canons and reactivate contemporary cultural and literary theories as well as unleash the emancipatory potential of scholarship aimed at criticizing and fighting against cultural hegemony, political, social, gender, racial, and other forms of oppression, including symbolic domination.