SECOND WRITING REQUIREMENT SUGGESTED TOPICS
You may use this course to fulfill the second writing requirement, it you wish. To qualify for this option, you MUST have completed ENWR 110 or the equivalent. In fact, if you are in your first year of study, I strongly urge you to postpone. Students do better on this requirement and get more out of it if they are more mature.
If you meet the above qualifications, here are some suggested topics. Please check with me if you have questions.
Your second writing paper should be a research paper. You will be doing fieldwork for you collection project. Your paper should be based on published texts and can serve as background for your collection project. Thus, if you are ready to select your collection project now, you are more than welcome to tailor your paper so that it will channel into that project. Otherwise, pick something fun and interesting from the list below. Or suggest your own topic. Please do check with me before you start, though.
Your second writing paper should meet national expository writing standards. This means that it should have a thesis that you set out to investigate. It means formal writing style: no contractions, no colloquial expressions or slang terms. It also means full documentation. You can use any international standard. Author name and page number in parentheses in the text and full bibliography at the end would be just fine.
SUGGESTED TOPICS:
1. We said that place spirits and other "unclean" beings articulate and uphold order. Look at the stories in the second half of Ivanits. See if you can find a pattern, an "order," that is being upheld. Compare to the Minenko article in the second half of Balzer. That article discusses honorable behavior and desirable traits. Are they the behavior and traits upheld by place spirits? You can also compare and contrast to American legends about upholding similar traits. Are these traits presented as positive or negative in American legends? A good source for American stories is the set of urban legend books published by Jan Harold Brunvand (titles include: Vanishing Hitchhiker, Choking Doberman, Mexican Pet, Curses, Broiled Again, and a recently published compendium Too Good to be True).
2. Get one of Gimbutas' books such as Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. Look at some of the ideas and images presented in that book, especially as pertains to the subjects we are covering: people's relationship with the environment, the soil, and crops. Then go to my Ukrainian Village website at http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~nkm and look under the heading Rushnyky. This shows ritual towels and their designs, symbols, uses, etc. Look to find similar images in similar arrangements and with similar meanings. Discuss the similarities and differences and speculate on the reasons why some patterns and images have continued and others have not. You are welcome to use icon books in place of or alongside rushnyky. Be forewarned that there are not many icon books in English.
3. Get W. F. Ryan's Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia. Extract and examine the magic acts that occur in conjunction with yearly cycle rituals. These are the rites of Christmas, Easter, and the like that we cover in this course. What sorts of acts are performed at calendar holidays? What patterns can you see? One possible pattern might be the one proposed by Turner, namely that there is status reversal at the transition points in the year. Describe the patterns, connect to other material we have covered and speculate on the meaning and purpose of the patterns you detect. Bogatyrev can be a big help here since he discusses magic and ritual. You might look for status reversal and age. You can connect issues of age to the ancestor cult and the article by Veletskaia in Balzer. You might look for status reversal and gender. You can connect to place spirits and rusalki or you might chose witches and the legends about them.
4. Take one of the issues presented in The Unmaking of Soviet Life such as the problem of excluding certain people when communes were reorganized after the fall of the Soviet Union. Why would exclusion be such a horrible fate? You will need to parallel to other material in the course. You might want to use the material in the Village Project to show the protection of boundaries. You might also wish to use SourceCat for the same purpose. The URL is http://nmc2.itc.virginia.edu/SourceCatslfk/ If you use SourceCat, you need to type <guest> into both slots to view. The issue of exclusion is only one possible topic. You can look at how gangs are organized. Is it the same as regular society? Is it different? When the gang inverts social norms, are the inversions the same as those found in ritual?
5. C.J. Cherryh wrote a novel called Rusalka. What you are dealing with here is both a literary treatment and a western view on a Slavic "unclean" spirit or deity. Compare and contrast the literary treatment to the material in Ivanits and in lecture. What adaptations does Cherryh make? Which can you explain in terms of cultural differences? Give the explanation in your discussion, of course.
The above are only suggestions and you can chose other topics. Good sources of Russian material, in addition to the books used in this course and the ones cited above are:
Ben Eklof and Stephen Frank, The World of the Russian Peasant
David Ransel, Family Life in Imperial Russia
Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia
Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia
Christine Worobec, Possessed
Olga Semenova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
Roberta Reeder, Russian Folk Lyrics
Rena Jean Hanchuk, Word and Wax
Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia
Joyce Toomre and Musya Glantz, Food in Russian History and Culture
And, of course, you can suggest material appropriate to your own ethnic group. Please check with one of us if you want to use a book not on the list.