Description
They address the teaching of these iconic works of Russian literature in different contexts and to different audiences, from undergraduate students reading Russian classics in the context of general education courses to graduate students exploring the larger context of Russian print culture. Most of the essays address teaching in English translation, a few in the original, but all offer useful strategies that can be adopted for teaching to any audience.
Contributors include: Robert L. Belknap, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Ksana Blank, Ellen Chances, Nicholas Dames, Andrew R. Durkin, Jefferson J.A. Gatrall, Svetlana Slavskaya Grenier, Robert Louis Jackson, Liza Knapp, Deborah A. Martinsen, Olga Meerson, Maude Meisel, Robin Feuer Miller, Marcia A. Morris, Gary Saul Morson, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Cathy Popkin, Irina Reyfman, Rebecca Stanton, William Mills Todd III, and Nancy Workman.
About the Author
Robert L. Belknap is Professor Emeritus of Russian at Columbia. He was educated at Princeton University, The University of Paris, Columbia University, and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, and is the author of The Structure of a /The Brothers Karamazova (1967, 1989, in Russian 1997), The Genesis of a /The Brothers Karamazova (1990), and other studies of Russian literature and of university education. He has taught courses in general education, literary theory, and Russian and comparative literature.
Reviews
"This volume celebrates the career of Columbia University Professor Robert L. Belknap (1929-2014), who trained a generation of teachers and scholars working across North America. The contribution to it by Belknap himself provides a fascinating history of pedagogical experimentation at Columbia during his time there. The twenty-one other contributors to the volume, drawn from his former students, colleagues, and admirers, practice what he preached. The mix of close-reading and contextualization that he and his colleagues promoted and delivered is an inspiration and a challenge for those of us who deal with shorter semesters, fewer teaching hours each week, and undergraduates who cannot read as many pages as he did. . . . In his own essay, Belknap describes his own life's work as "studying and teaching." It seems clear that he regards the two as linked, as indeed they are in all the contributions to this volume. Each essay can be profitably read as both scholarship and pedagogy." - The Russian Review, October 2015 issue (Vol. 74, No. 4)
"This impressive volume on nineteenth-century literature with its twenty-two essays (on such classical Russian writers as Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov) authored by experienced scholars who regularly teach the great books attests to the notable influence of the late Robert L. Belknap (Columbia University) on the field of Russian Studies in the United States." - Elizabeth Blake, Saint Louis University, Slavic and East European Journal, 59.3 (Fall 2015)
Book Information
ISBN 9781618113498
Author Deborah A. Martinsen
Format Hardback
Page Count 354
Imprint Academic Studies Press
Publisher Academic Studies Press