Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative

Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative PDF Author: Sarah J. Young
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843311143
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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"--Back cover.

Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative

Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative PDF Author: Sarah J. Young
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843311143
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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"--Back cover.

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form PDF Author: Greta Matzner-Gore
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014199X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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.

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form PDF 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.

Dostoevsky's "Idiot"

Dostoevsky's Author: Bruce A. French
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810117457
Category : Narration (Rhetoric)
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
Prince Myshkin is one of Dostoevsky's most perplexing creations. In this study, Bruce A. French presents a provocative interpretation of the religious dimension of Myshkin's goodness from a Bakhtinian perspective. In three chapters, French takes up in turn the narrator and narrative points of view, the author's use of inserted narratives, and three modes of interaction French calls Monologue, Dialogue, and Dialogical Living.

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky PDF Author: Grant Walker Broadhurst
Publisher: An Unexpected Journal
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dostoevsky Sober Hope: Finding Faith in the Bleak Midwinter As winter descends to end the year 2023, it is a time for contemplation: a time to revel in the joys and find balm for the woes of the past year, a time to find the courage to hold on, and the hope to thrive in the new year. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) faced his own bleak (and Russian!) winters, from childhood play amongst the impoverished at his father’s medical clinic to a last minute reprieve from the Tsar’s firing squad for discussing banned books followed by ten years of prison camp and military service in exile. While his novels, such as Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov demonstrate human depravity they also give glimmers of grace, love, and beauty which have made him one of the most beloved novelists of all time. It is our hope that as you find time to relax during the holiday season (making it a habit for the new year!), that you will find these discussions deeply meaningful. Awaiting for you within are discussions of his characters from novels and short stories alike, Dostoevsky-inspired poems, and reviews of films, books, and even contemporary music which reflect the light and warmth he dared to find in his own bleak winter. CONTRIBUTORS * "Dostoevsky for Our Times" by Editorial introduction by Seth Myers. DOSTOEVSKY: THE FUNDAMENTALS * "Dostoevsky the Culturally Active Christian" by William Collen * "Dostoevsky's Narrative of (Un)Belief: From Psychology to Theology" by John Givens * "Underground Apologetics" by George Scondras * "A Midterm in Russian Literature" by Tom Sims THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV * "The Brothers Karamazov and the Existential Problem of Atheism" by Josiah Peterson * "Fifty Shades of Bleak: The Karamazov Principle Explored" by Matthew Lilley * "Dear, Kind God: A Divine Dilemma" by Grant Walker Broadhurst THE IDIOT * "Beauty in Tragedy: The Idiot, Dostoevsky, and Eucatastrophe" by Clark Weidner * "Interpreting Prince Myshkin: The Idiot" by Joshua Jo Wah Yen CRIME AND PUNISHMENT * "What Would I Be Without God?" by Sojourna Howfree * "By Their Fruit: An Allegorical Tale" by Brian Melton SHORT STORIES AND POEMS *"Crazy Love: The Action and Call of Grace in Dostoevsky's 'The Dream of the Ridiculous Man'" by Theresa Pihl * "The Heart of Christ and Dostoevsky's 'The Christmas Tree and a Wedding'" by Christy Luis * "2057 Carnot Street" by Patricia Newberry * "Another Magi's Journey" by Awara Fernandez * "Necropolis and the Soul's Well" by Katie Windham REVIEWS * "From Literature to Film: Adapting Dostoevsky's Works" by Mary Lou Cornish * "Soul Survival Kit: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky" by Seth Myers . * "Dostoevsky, Man About Town: Gulags, Muscovite Gentlemen, and Murakami" by Seth Myers * "Review of James Scanlan's Dostoevsky the Thinker," by Seth Myers * "Dostoevsky in Midnights' Metropolis: Midnights' Anti-Hero and Marvel-ous Heroes" by Seth Myers Volume 6, Issue 4, Advent 2024 330 pages Cover Image: Riz Crescini

Reading Backwards

Reading Backwards PDF Author: Muireann Maguire
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800641222
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book outlines with theoretical and literary historical rigor a highly innovative approach to the writing of Russian literary history and to the reading of canonical Russian texts. "Anticipatory plagiarism” is a concept developed by the French Oulipo group, but it has never to my knowledge been explored with reference to Russian studies. The editors and contributors to the proposed volume – a blend of senior and beginning scholars, Russians and non-Russians – offer a set of essays on Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy which provocatively test the utility of AP as a critical tool, relating these canonical authors to more recent instances, some of them decidedly non-canonical. The senior scholars who are the editors and most of the contributors are truly distinguished. The volume is likely to receive serious attention and to be widely read. I recommend it with unqualified enthusiasm. William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Harvard University As the founder of the notion of "plagiarism by anticipation", which was stolen from me in the sixties by fellow colleagues, I am delighted to learn that my modest contribution to literary theory will be used to better understand the interplay of interferences in Russian literature. Indeed, one would have to be naive to think that the great Russian authors would have invented everything. In fact, they were able to draw their ideas from their predecessors, but also from their successors, testifying to the open-mindedness that characterizes the Slavic soul. This book restores the truth. Pierre Bayard, Professor of Literature, University of Paris 8 This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives. Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature re-assesses three major nineteenth-century authors—Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—either in terms of previous writers and artists who plagiarized them (such as Raphael, Homer, or Hall Caine), or of their own depredations against later writers (from J.M. Coetzee to Liudmila Petrushevskaia). Far from suggesting that past authors literally stole from their descendants, these engaging essays, contributed by both early-career and senior scholars of Russian and comparative literature, encourage us to identify the contingent and familiar within classic texts. By moving beyond rigid notions of cultural heritage and literary canons, they demonstrate that inspiration is cyclical, influence can flow in multiple directions, and no idea is ever truly original. This book will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Russian Studies. The introductory discussion of the origins and context of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’, alongside varied applications of the concept, will also be of interest to those working in the wider fields of comparative literature, reception studies, and translation studies.

Mimetic Lives

Mimetic Lives PDF Author: Chloë Kitzinger
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth. Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces a productive tension between mimetic characterization and the author’s ambition to transform the reader. She shows how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky create lifelike characters and why the dream of carrying the illusion of “life” beyond the novel consistently fails. Mimetic Lives challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate us by providing enduring models for the perspectives of others, with whom we can then better empathize. Seen close, the realist novel’s power to create a world of compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought and its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social, or political change. Drawing on scholarship in Russian literary studies as well as the theory of the novel, Kitzinger’s lucid work of criticism will intrigue and challenge scholars working in both fields.

The Image of Christ in Russian Literature

The Image of Christ in Russian Literature PDF Author: John Givens
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501757792
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self PDF Author: Yuri Corrigan
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081013571X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche. Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

The Gift of Active Empathy

The Gift of Active Empathy PDF Author: Alina Wyman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810133385
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.