BASC50023 - Short Stories of Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy II

Course Description

Instructor: Claudia Traudt.  For two quarters, we will wrestle two titans of conception, language and penetration: Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy. In the likes of Death in Venice, Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow, Felix Krull, Tristan, and Tonio Kroger, Mann harrowingly limns order and abandon, longing, loss, besieged and fraught identity. With these, we will juxtapose Tolstoy’s explorations of ‘ dread, foolish youth and time's irony, collisions of "civilized" and frontier standards, stupified greed, stoicism and grace, warrior tradition and Fate in such wondrous short stories as The Death of Ivan Ilych, "Family Happiness," "The Cossacks," "Master and Man," and "Hadji Murad." Course code: BASC50023