Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky

Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky PDF Author: Susanne Fusso
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810151901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote about sexuality from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's time and that he, an avid reader and observer of his own social context, absorbed and reacted to, Susanne Fusso gives us a new way of understanding a critical element in the writing of one of Russia's literary masters. Beyond discovering Dostoevsky's own views and representations of sexuality as a reflection of his culture and his time, Fusso also explores his artistic treatment of how children and adolescents discover sexuality as part of their growth. Some of the topics Fusso considers are Dostoevsky's search for an appropriate artistic language for sexuality, a young narrator's experimentation with homoerotic desire and unconventional narrative in A Raw Youth; and Dostoevsky's approach to a young man's sexual development in A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov. She also explores his complex treatment of a child's secret sexuality in his account of the Kroneberg child abuse case in A Writer's Diary; and his conception of the ideal family, a type of family that appears in his works mainly by negative example. Focusing mainly on sexual practices considered "deviant" in Dostoevsky's time--both because these are the practices that his young characters confront and because they offer the most intriguing interpretive problems--Fusso decodes the author's texts and their social contexts. In doing so, she highlights one thread in the intricate thematic weave of Dostoevsky's novels and newly illuminates his artistic process.

Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky

Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky PDF Author: Susanne Fusso
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810151901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote about sexuality from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's time and that he, an avid reader and observer of his own social context, absorbed and reacted to, Susanne Fusso gives us a new way of understanding a critical element in the writing of one of Russia's literary masters. Beyond discovering Dostoevsky's own views and representations of sexuality as a reflection of his culture and his time, Fusso also explores his artistic treatment of how children and adolescents discover sexuality as part of their growth. Some of the topics Fusso considers are Dostoevsky's search for an appropriate artistic language for sexuality, a young narrator's experimentation with homoerotic desire and unconventional narrative in A Raw Youth; and Dostoevsky's approach to a young man's sexual development in A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov. She also explores his complex treatment of a child's secret sexuality in his account of the Kroneberg child abuse case in A Writer's Diary; and his conception of the ideal family, a type of family that appears in his works mainly by negative example. Focusing mainly on sexual practices considered "deviant" in Dostoevsky's time--both because these are the practices that his young characters confront and because they offer the most intriguing interpretive problems--Fusso decodes the author's texts and their social contexts. In doing so, she highlights one thread in the intricate thematic weave of Dostoevsky's novels and newly illuminates his artistic process.

Dostoevsky Studies

Dostoevsky Studies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, Russian
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Resurrection from the Underground

Resurrection from the Underground PDF Author: René Girard
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628951087
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In a fascinating analysis of critical themes in Feodor Dostoevsky’s work, René Girard explores the implications of the Russian author’s “underground,” a site of isolation, alienation, and resentment. Brilliantly translated, this book is a testament to Girard’s remarkable engagement with Dostoevsky’s work, through which he discusses numerous aspects of the human condition, including desire, which Girard argues is “triangular” or “mimetic”—copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our own. Girard’s interdisciplinary approach allows him to shed new light on religion, spirituality, and redemption in Dostoevsky’s writing, culminating in a revelatory discussion of the author’s spiritual understanding and personal integration. Resurrection is an essential and thought-provoking companion to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition

Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition PDF Author: George Pattison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521782783
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his work. The aim of this collection is not to abstract Dostoevsky's religious 'teaching' from his literary works, but to explore the interaction between his Christian faith and his writing. The essays cover such topics as temptation, grace and law, Dostoevsky's use of the gospels and hagiography, Trinitarianism, and the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser-known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree.

Dostoevsky's Secrets

Dostoevsky's Secrets PDF Author: Carol Apollonio Flath
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810125323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand. In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

Fyodor Dostoevsky—In the Beginning (1821–1845)

Fyodor Dostoevsky—In the Beginning (1821–1845) PDF Author: Thomas Gaiton Marullo
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501757075
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
More than a century after his death in 1881, Fyodor Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers and reviewers. Countless studies of his writing have been published—more than a dozen in the past few years alone. In this important new work, Thomas Marullo provides a diary-portrait of Dostoevsky's early years drawn from the letters, memoirs, and criticism of the writer, as well as from the testimony and witness of family and friends, readers and reviewers, and observers and participants in his life. Marullo's exhaustive search of published materials on Dostoevsky sheds light on many unexplored corners of Dostoevsky's childhood, adolescence, and youth. Speakers of excerpts are given maximum freedom: Anything they said about the writer—the good and the bad, the truth and the lies—are included, with extensive footnotes providing correctives, counter-arguments, and other pertinent information. The first part of this volume, "All in the Family," focuses on Dostoevsky's early formation and schooling, i.e., his time in city and country, and his ties to his family, particularly his parents. The second section, "To Petersburg!," features Dostoevsky's early days in Russia's imperial city, his years at the Main Engineering Academy, and the death of his father. The third part, "Darkness before Dawn," deals with the writer's youthful struggles and strivings, culminating in the success of his work, Poor Folk. This clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the world's greatest writers will appeal to students, teachers, and scholars of Dostoevsky's early life, as well as general readers interested in Dostoevsky, literature, and history.

Dostoevsky the Thinker

Dostoevsky the Thinker PDF Author: James Patrick Scanlan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439940
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
For all his distance from philosophy, Dostoevsky was one of the most philosophical of writers. Drawing on his novels, essays, letters and notebooks, this volume examines Dostoevsky's philosophical thought.

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

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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.

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia PDF Author: Irina Paperno
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801484254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Analyzing a variety of sources--medical reports, social treatises, legal codes, newspaper articles, fiction, private documents left by suicides--Irina Paperno describes the search for the meaning of suicide. Paperno focuses on Russia of the 1860s-1880s.

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment PDF Author: Robert Guay
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190464011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The gruesome double-murder upon which the novel Crime and Punishment hinges leads its culprit, Raskolnikov, into emotional trauma and obsessive, destructive self-reflection. But Raskolnikov's famous philosophical musings are just part of the full philosophical thought manifest in one of Dostoevsky's most famous novels. This volume, uniquely, brings together prominent philosophers and literary scholars to deepen our understanding of the novel's full range of philosophical thought. The seven essays treat a diversity of topics, including: language and the representation of the human mind, emotions and the susceptibility to loss, the nature of agency, freedom and the possibility of evil, the family and the failure of utopian critique, the authority of law and morality, and the dialogical self. Further, authors provide new approaches for thinking about the relationship between literary representation and philosophy, and the way that Dostoevsky labored over intricate problems of narrative form in Crime and Punishment. Together, these essays demonstrate a seminal work's full philosophical worth--a novel rich with complex themes whose questions reverberate powerfully into the 21st century.