English 203

Other Readings and Media

Chekhov, Anton: Selected Stories, The Complete Plays, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, Notebooks

Description

This is a team-taught course, cross-listed with the Department of Journalism. The instructors are Robert Hass from the English Department and Mark Danner from Journalism. Danner is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who has written extensively about political violence. The course will be an investigation of the procedures of Anton Chekhov, who reinvented the forms of the prose tale and the stage play in the last years of the nineteenth century. It will include a very demanding amount of reading, including almost all the stories of Chekhov, most of the major plays, his account of his visit to the prison island of Sakhalin, and relevant criticism of his work. The format will be seminar-style discussion. Written assignments will be developed based on student interest and the range of questions about Chekhov, the social life of Russia in the years before the revolution, the conventions of realism, and narrative theory. No reading knowledge of Russian is required.