RUSN 375 Codes and Cultures in the 20th Century

Two intimately related schools of literary analysis from the early 20th Century Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism staked out fundamentally new theoretical terrain by isolating the functional elements of verbal artistry as discrete objects of rigorous inquiry. Their works merit close inspection as representative of a big bang in theory and cultures of binary encoding that continues to expand and proliferate to thisday subsuming the visual arts music cinema broadcast media digital computation the cognitive sciences and espionage. This course traces lines and shifts in the intellectual history of this brief moment through close reading of selected works and situates theory in the biographies and broader social cultural and political contexts of its key figures.Course taught in English; no knowledge of Russian required.