Advanced English classes for Economics Major
Two showcases present the very best examples of students' projects in courses taught by Dr. Ashley Squires at the Joint HSE NES undergraduate program in 2018
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Ashley Squires
Assistant Professor of Humanities and Languages, New Economic School
Into the Wild: The Romantic Tradition in America
The term “Romanticism” describes an aesthetic movement that defined literary,artistic, and musical production in Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In the course, “Into the Wild,” we explored the impactof romanticism on American literature, focusing on key figures of that period such as Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Melville. However, we also considered romanticism not only as a bounded historical period but as a tradition, a set of themes and tropes that have remained influential ever since that time. Thus, the “classic” workswere paired with more recent books and films that reflect the aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological concerns of the Romantics in ways that are appropriate for their own historical moment.
In their final projects, students were asked to reflect on the impact of the “Romantic tradition” across cultures and historical periods. In some cases, this meant looking at the historical role of certain conventional Romantic figures. Sofya Sivtseva, in heressay, examines the relationship between American poet Walt Whitman and nineteenth century feminism. Ivan Golovko, on the other hand, looks at the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov as the embodiment of Russian Romanticism.
Other students examined the influence of Romantic art and attitudes on the present day. Maria Karibova explores the influence of poet Emily Dickinson on the work of New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion, while Anna Algina sees the films of Wes Andersonas having their own, updated Romantic aesthetic. Finally, Fedor Tyurin looks at how nostalgia for the Soviet Union in the twentieth-century reflects a highly contemporary form of “Romanticization.”
Unreal City: Urban Environments in Literature and Film
As places where the best and worst parts of humanity converge, cities are huge, unwieldy signifiers capable of containing a multitude of meanings — as centers of culturaland economic production, as social experiments, as the sources of moral decay, as breeding grounds for crime, and as sites of multicultural exchange. Students in the “Unreal City” course explore representations of cities in both literature and cinema. In the Spring 2018 iteration of the class, we focused primarily on representations of New York as a kind of “representative” city, but students were encouraged to branch outand explore other environments in their own research.
Collected here is a sampling of the best final projects. Two essays by Valeria Makarova and Maria Kotikova look at Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie from different angles. Makarova is interested in the role of cities in the development of consumer culture, a dominant theme in this novel, while Kotikova is interested in the development of the central character and her attitudes toward urban poverty.
Ekaterina Petrova, meanwhile, is concerned with a very different female protagonist from a very different urban environment. Her essay focuses on changes in the city of Atlanta pre- and post-Civil War as reflected in the novel Gone with the Wind. In her analysis, she also explains why some characters are better suited to the more modernurban milieu of post-war Atlanta than those associated with ante-bellum gentility.
In this course, we did look at two examples of dystopian visions of the city, and Maxim Chupilikin builds on this discussion by examining competing urban themes in twentieth century literature. Here he contrasts conventional stereotypes of cities asspaces of freedom – plots where, like Dreiser’s Carrie, characters move from the benighted countryside to the land of opportunity – to representations of cities as dystopias of control in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.
Students also looked at representations of cities in cinema. In his essay, Konstantin Orlov examines the historical accuracy of Martin Scorsese’s historical epic, The Gangs of New York, which depicts a fictionalized version of an actual historical conflict between two nineteenth-century gangs. Egor Stoyan also looks to history by examining at films that show American cities during the Great Depression, demonstrating how these portrayals shifted over the decades.
We would like to thank Oxana Budjko for helping us make this collection public.
Rebecca Darnell and Maria Bognat were also critical to the editing and production process.
The term “Romanticism” describes an aesthetic movement that defined literary,artistic, and musical production in Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In the course, “Into the Wild,” we explored the impactof romanticism on American literature, focusing on key figures of that period such as Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Melville. However, we also considered romanticism not only as a bounded historical period but as a tradition, a set of themes and tropes that have remained influential ever since that time. Thus, the “classic” workswere paired with more recent books and films that reflect the aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological concerns of the Romantics in ways that are appropriate for their own historical moment.
In their final projects, students were asked to reflect on the impact of the “Romantic tradition” across cultures and historical periods. In some cases, this meant looking at the historical role of certain conventional Romantic figures. Sofya Sivtseva, in heressay, examines the relationship between American poet Walt Whitman and nineteenth century feminism. Ivan Golovko, on the other hand, looks at the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov as the embodiment of Russian Romanticism.
Other students examined the influence of Romantic art and attitudes on the present day. Maria Karibova explores the influence of poet Emily Dickinson on the work of New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion, while Anna Algina sees the films of Wes Andersonas having their own, updated Romantic aesthetic. Finally, Fedor Tyurin looks at how nostalgia for the Soviet Union in the twentieth-century reflects a highly contemporary form of “Romanticization.”
Unreal City: Urban Environments in Literature and Film
As places where the best and worst parts of humanity converge, cities are huge, unwieldy signifiers capable of containing a multitude of meanings — as centers of culturaland economic production, as social experiments, as the sources of moral decay, as breeding grounds for crime, and as sites of multicultural exchange. Students in the “Unreal City” course explore representations of cities in both literature and cinema. In the Spring 2018 iteration of the class, we focused primarily on representations of New York as a kind of “representative” city, but students were encouraged to branch outand explore other environments in their own research.
Collected here is a sampling of the best final projects. Two essays by Valeria Makarova and Maria Kotikova look at Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie from different angles. Makarova is interested in the role of cities in the development of consumer culture, a dominant theme in this novel, while Kotikova is interested in the development of the central character and her attitudes toward urban poverty.
Ekaterina Petrova, meanwhile, is concerned with a very different female protagonist from a very different urban environment. Her essay focuses on changes in the city of Atlanta pre- and post-Civil War as reflected in the novel Gone with the Wind. In her analysis, she also explains why some characters are better suited to the more modernurban milieu of post-war Atlanta than those associated with ante-bellum gentility.
In this course, we did look at two examples of dystopian visions of the city, and Maxim Chupilikin builds on this discussion by examining competing urban themes in twentieth century literature. Here he contrasts conventional stereotypes of cities asspaces of freedom – plots where, like Dreiser’s Carrie, characters move from the benighted countryside to the land of opportunity – to representations of cities as dystopias of control in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.
Students also looked at representations of cities in cinema. In his essay, Konstantin Orlov examines the historical accuracy of Martin Scorsese’s historical epic, The Gangs of New York, which depicts a fictionalized version of an actual historical conflict between two nineteenth-century gangs. Egor Stoyan also looks to history by examining at films that show American cities during the Great Depression, demonstrating how these portrayals shifted over the decades.
We would like to thank Oxana Budjko for helping us make this collection public.
Rebecca Darnell and Maria Bognat were also critical to the editing and production process.
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