Author: Greta Matzner-Gore
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810141971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.
Author: Alexander Spektor
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Get Book Here
Book Description
Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov seek to affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction at the formal level. By doing so, these two authors ask us to consider and respond to the ethical demands that narrative acts of representation and interpretation place on authors and readers. Using the lens of narrative ethics, Alexander Spektor brings to light the important, previously unexplored correspondences between Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Ultimately, he argues for a productive comparison of how each writer investigates the ethical costs of narrating oneself and others. He also explores the power dynamics between author, character, narrator, and reader. In his readings of such texts as “The Meek One” and The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Bend Sinister and Despair by Nabokov, Spektor demonstrates that these authors incite the reader’s sense of ethics by exposing the risks but also the possibilities of narrative fiction.
Author: Katherine Bowers
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487508638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
Reconsidering Dostoevsky's legacy 200 years after his birth, this collection addresses how and why his novels contribute so much to what we think of as the modern condition.
Author: Sarah Young
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857287354
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Provides an innovative theoretical framework for an analysis that integrates structural and narratological considerations with thematic (religious and ethical) aspects, by focusing on the characters' interactivity as the most fundamental level on which the ethical systems of the novel are enacted. Examines the questions of what ethical bases are put forward by the novel, what faith-issues and philosophical world-views they derive from, and how, in terms of structuring and narration rather than simply thematically, they are presented in the novel ... Through the concept of scripting, the author shows how the ethical becomes the foundation for the narratological in The idiot"--Page 4 of cover
Author: Paul J. Contino
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725250764
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this book Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel, and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha's mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility "to all, for all" develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader's guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a "monk in the world," and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha's brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya's struggle to become a "new man" and Ivan's anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha's generative role with the young people he encounters, and his final message of hope.
Author: Hayden White
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501765051
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Get Book Here
Book Description
Hayden White is widely considered to be the most influential historical theorist of the twentieth century. The Ethics of Narrative brings together nearly all of White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing a lesser-known side of White: that of the public intellectual. From modern patriotism and European identity to Hannah Arendt's writings on totalitarianism, from the idea of the historical museum and the theme of melancholy in art history to trenchant readings of Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi, the first volume of The Ethics of Narrative shows White at his most engaging, topical, and capacious. Expertly introduced by editor Robert Doran, who lucidly explains the major themes, sources, and frames of reference of White's thought, this volume features five previously unpublished lectures, as well as more complete versions of several published essays, thereby giving the reader unique access to White's late thought. In addition to historical theorists and intellectual historians, The Ethics of Narrative will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities in such fields as literary and cultural studies, art history and visual studies, and media studies.
Author: Lynn Ellen Patyk
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014574X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book Here
Book Description
Confronting Bakhtin’s formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers—and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevsky’s poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevsky’s provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity. Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource.
Author: David Stromberg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611496659
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Get Book Here
Book Description
Narrative Faith engages with the dynamics of doubt and faith to consider how literary works with complex structures explore different moral visions. The study describes a literary petite histoire that problematizes faith in two ways—both in the themes presented in the story, and the strategies used to tell that story—leading readers to doubt the narrators and their narratives. Starting with Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), a literary work that has captivated and confounded critics and readers for well over a century, the study examines Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Penitent (1973/83), works by twentieth-century authors who similarly intensify questions of faith through narrators that generate doubt. The two postwar novelists share parallel preoccupations with Dostoevsky’s art and similar personal philosophies, while their works constitute two literary responses to the cataclysm of the Second World War—extending questions of faith into the current era. The book’s last section looks beyond narrative inquiry to consider themes of confession and revision that appear in all three novels and open onto horizons beyond faith and doubt—to hope.
Author: Gary Saul Morson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513
Get Book Here
Book Description
Gary Saul Morson brings to life the intense intellectual debates shaping two centuries of Russian writing. Dialogues of great writers with philosophical wanderers and blood-soaked radicals reveal a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded wonder, rendering the Russian literary canon at once distinctive and universally human.
Author: Anna A. Berman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192691864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis—looking back to ancestors and head to progeny—while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis—family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.
