DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

This is the third of a three-quarter sequence designed to introduce students to Polish language and culture. We continue to learn the basic grammar of Polish, focusing on speaking, reading, writing, and listening.

Elementary Russian 101-3 is the third part in a three-quarter sequence designed to introduce students to the Russian language and contemporary Russian culture. In this course, students will continue to develop the fundamentals of speaking, listening, writing, and reading through a variety of communicative and content-based activities. Emphasis will be placed on practical communication so that students should be able to function at a basic level in several authentic situations by the end of the year.

Intermediate Russian 102-3 is the continuation of a two-year sequence that enables students to acquire intermediate-level proficiency.  It proposes the further development and command of skills and abilities in the areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Emphasis is also placed on vocabulary expansion, especially in the areas of speaking and writing. A great deal of attention will be devoted to the learning of grammar in conjunction with the immediate activation of it in conversation.

Rock and punk music played a substantial yet still underappreciated role in subverting the power of the communist system among the youth cultures of the Eastern bloc countries. Poland was no exception, as these two types of music became remarkable artistic and subversive cultural realms during the communist period in Poland. Even though rock was repeatedly attacked, banned, and relegated to illegal culture status it became an integral part of the Polish urban landscape under the communist rule. The rock and punk bands provided a (loud) voice and a space of freedom for the younger generations who were searching for their identity within the controlling and ominous communist state. In this class we will look at the phenomenon of massive popularity of Western rock and punk music along with the exceptional fame of music created by Polish artists as well as its significance in the Polish urban culture under communism.

(Co-listed with Linguistics 363)

Northwestern University is a community, working to set goals, achieve them, defining and striving for excellence, etc. As such, we are a speech community, using language to describe and form our culture and identity. This includes jargon (e.g., Wildcat, distros, CAESAR, CTECs, DM, ASG, SafeRide, MMLC, etc.) and slang. We focus on language, identity, and heritage, and the students create “WildWords”: https://nudictionary.mmlc.northwestern.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

(Co-listed with Int St 390-0-22)

This course examines the roots and the drivers of Putin’s foreign policy. We will look at factors leading to the USSR’s disintegration and resulting ethnic conflicts, security issues and responses. The U.S. faced four nuclear powers (Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus), under-secured nuclear weapons, and armed secessionist conflicts in the Caucasus and Moldova. We will examine the post-Cold War security environment, focusing on Russia’s efforts to assert a sphere of influence, and its efforts to undermine Western solidarity and confidence in the liberal democratic system.