Complex Curves in Almost-Complex Manifolds and Meromorphic Hulls

This are the notes of a course, given by the first author for the Graduiertenkollegs (=graduate students) at the Ruhr-University Bochum, in December 1997. These lectures pursued two main tasks: FIRST - to give a systematic and self-contained introduction to the Gromov theory of pseudoholomorphic curves. This is done in Chapters I,II,III. SECOND - to explain our join results on envelopes of meromorphy of real surfaces in complex two-dimensional manifolds. We do this in Chapter IV.