123041 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2021S)

For a long time, Anglophone literary and cultural production has been drawn to Russia. Following the first English expedition to Russia in 1553 and the foundation of the Muscovy Company in 1555, English literature, especially Renaissance drama, started to engage with the far-away and seemingly exotic place. While, initially, English representations of Russia mainly relied on Western European accounts of it, cultural production from the East gradually rose in significance. Especially from the late nineteenth century onwards, Russian literature, most notably through the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy, started to exert greater influence on English writers and their writing. In the twentieth century, the relations between Russia as part of the Soviet Union and the West deteriorated politically, though left-leaning Anglophone writers were simultaneously attracted to the self-proclaimed workers’ paradise. More recently, Russia may have undergone drastic political and social changes, but this has in no way diminished the curiosity of Anglophone writing for what is by far the largest country in the world by area.

In this Proseminar, we concern ourselves with Anglophone literary representations of Russia. In this sense, our glimpse is unidirectional (we do not consider Russian representations of the English-speaking world). Adopting a diachronic view from the 17th century to the present, we consider a range of different genres and texts, both fictional and non-fictional, that engage with Russia to varying degrees. We read the first English play in which Russia plays a central role, John Fletcher’s The Loyal Subject (1618); Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), which can rightly be read as a response to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866); and Helen Dunmore’s The Siege (2001), which engages with the Siege of Leningrad in World War II. Besides these British texts, we also consider examples from other Anglophone traditions, namely the accounts of Claude McKay, key representative of the Harlem Renaissance, of his journey to Soviet Russia in his autobiography A Long Way From Home (1937) as well as Gail Jones’s short story “Modernity” (1991).

Central questions addressed in this Proseminar will include:
1. How have Anglo-Russian relations evolved historically? When and why did England become interested in Russia and how have the relations changed since then?
2. How did Renaissance literature, in particular drama, engage with the then still little-known place?
3. How has Russian literary production affected and influenced English literature?
4. What role did Russia, in particular the Soviet Union, play for Black writers in the twentieth century? How have they made sense of it in literary terms?
5. How does Russia feature in contemporary Anglophone writing? What role does genre play in this regard?
6. How have the representations of Russia in Anglophone literatures changed throughout the centuries?

Apart from addressing the primary texts in their form and content, this Proseminar is also designed to introduce you to basic academic skills, including academic writing, thesis formulation and the structuring of a term paper in literary studies.