University of PittsburghDepartment of Slavic Languages and LiteraturesRussian 0870: History of Russian Film 1 Gerald McCauslandFall 2009 (2101) Office Hours: Monday 12:00–1:00Wednesday 1:00–4:50 Thursday 11:00–12:00Cathedral of Learning 202 email: <[email protected]>Course OverviewRequired TextsGibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Wrtiers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: MLA, 2003.Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.Taylor, Richard and Ian Christie, eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939. New York: Routledge, 1994.Taylor, Richard and Ian Christie, eds. Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1991.Research ResourcePadunov, Vladimir, maintainer. University of Pittsburgh: Russian and Soviet Cinema: Bibliography. <http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/video/cinema_biblio.html>Students will be introduced to several other tools and resources for research on Soviet and Russian cinema throughout the course. Requirements1. Students are required to attend all class meetings. The instructor should not be expected to make, and will not make, any special effort to accommodate students who are absent from any class meeting. Students who miss a class meeting are responsible for screening the film (and any related clips) on their own and for obtaining all relevant handouts and notes from their fellow students.2. Students are required to complete all reading assignments before the class meeting for which they are listed on the class schedule. Depending on the nature of the readings, students will be expected to have absorbed the factual information contained therein and/or to be ready to discuss the theoretical, aesthetic, or political issues raised by the author(s). Although the instructor may occasionally review the reading assignment during class, the reading should always be considered prerequisite to rather than a first runthrough of the topic for that particular day.3. In addition to class discussions, historical documents, theoretical investigations, and interpretive articles will be discussed prior to each class meeting using the Blackboard (Courseweb) online discussion forums. The instructor will pose specific questions to begin these discussions. All students are required to post to the discussion forum at least one time each week in response to the instructor’s prompt questions. In order to receive a grade higher than B-, students are expected to respond to the contributions of fellow course participants with regularity. Contributions to the discussion forum, whether in response to the instructor or to fellow students, should be relevant to and reference the assigned readings for that week. Uninformed opinion and irrelevant tangential musings, while perhaps valuable, will not contribute to the grade for this portion of the course. The discussion for each set of assigned readings will be closed after the class for which those readingswere assigned. A separate space will be available on the forum for students to continue discussions past the assigned date and/or to start their own topics. To the extent that these student-initiated discussions remain relevant to the material that we are studying, participation in them will be credited to the grade for this portion of the course.4. There will be seven required formal writing assignments over the course of the semester along with one optional assignment. All writing assignments must be submitted in hard copy by 1:00 pm on the day of class. Papers submitted electronically are not accepted. Late papers are not accepted. Failure to submit an assignment when it is due will result in a grade of “0” (zero) for that assignment.5. There will be a comprehensive written final examination during the final examination period. Students should not make plans to leave Pittsburgh before the end of the examination period until the time of the Russian 0870 exam has been confirmed.6. While the instructor will make a good-faith effort to avoid the use of e-mail as the sole method of communication of important course information, all students are required to monitor their university e-mail accounts (@pitt.edu) or to forward their university e-mail to another reliable address. Any student choosing to forward their mail to another account bears full responsibility for the reliability of that account, including the proper configuration of spam filters. Failure to receive e-mail from the instructor is not a valid excuse for any resulting disadvantage suffered by a student.Evaluation1. Students are expected to participate in all class discussions and to contribute to the collective work of the group in a thoughtful and informed way. This implies familiarity with the reading assignments and with all films screened to date. Students will receive a grade for their participation in class for each class meeting. The instructor will explain the mechanics of this grading procedure during the first class meeting; students are welcome and encouraged to request feedback from the instructor about their class participation at any time throughout the semester. 2. There will be several unannounced quizzes given during the semester. They will be given at the start of class and will test the students’ comprehension of the reading material assigned for that day and the students’ detailed familiarity with the film assigned to be screened the previous week. Any student absent for a quiz or late for the start of that class meeting will receive a “0” (zero) for that quiz.3. There will be 7 mandatory and 1 optional writing assignments over the course of the semester. Each mandatory writing assignment must be submitted in the specified number of hard copies by 1:00 pm on the day it is due. The optional assignment will be accepted in the instructor’s mailbox (CL 1417) during the last week of classes, from 1 December until a final deadline of 12 noon on Monday, 8 December. Each mandatory assignment will receive a letter grade. The grades for all writing assignments will carry equal weight among themselves in the computation of the grade, regardless of differences in the nature and length of each individual writing task.4. The final course grade will be computed according to the following mathematical schema: Papers: 45% Final Examination: 15% Blackboard Electronic Discussion: 15% In-class