Download or read book Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics written by Mikhail Bakhtin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.
Download or read book The Classic Short Story 1870 1925 written by Florence Goyet and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular - the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre à son apogée (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing - particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry?nosuke - Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.
Download or read book Persistent Forms written by Ilya Kliger and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized. Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems. By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.
Download or read book Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition written by George Pattison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mikhail Bakhtin written by Mikhail Bakhtin and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This annotated book is a first English translation of 12-hours of interviews of Victor Duvakin with Mikhail Bakhtin recorded in 1973. From Freud to Kant, from the French Symbolists to the German Romantics, Bakhtin shares his knowledge and appreciation of various Western European authors and thinkers. As a result, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, invites us to reconsider the importance of Western art and thought to Bakhtin himself, and Russian culture in general.
Download or read book Dostoevsky s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin written by Ksana Blank and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-31 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, Ksana Blank borrows from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Christian dialectical traditions to formulate a dynamic image of Dostoevsky’s dialectics—distinct from Hegelian dialectics—as a philosophy of “compatible contradictions.” Expanding on the classical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, Blank guides us through Dostoevsky’s most difficult paradoxes: goodness that begets evil, beautiful personalities that bring about grief, and criminality that brings about salvation. Dostoevsky’s philosophy of contradictions, this book demonstrates, contributes to the development of antinomian thought in the writings of early twentieth-century Russian religious thinkers and to the development of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin marks an important and original intervention into the enduring debate over Dostoevsky’s spiritual philosophy.
Download or read book Mikhail Bakhtin written by Gary Saul Morson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 1108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity--with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally--is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all. Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought--as well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.
Download or read book Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics written by Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the ideal introduction to the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin is becoming established as one of the giants of 20th century literary criticsm, despite his work being unknown in the West until the 1970's. This book is less about Dostoyevsky per se, rather a profound meditation on how Dostoyevsky's art exemplifies the central concern of Bakhtin, the concept of 'dialogism'. This idea defies a simple definition; the book in exploring manifold aspects of it, itself becomes truly dialogic. If you value Dostoyevsky as an artist, require an antidote to the chill winds of modern 'Theory', or simply appreciate genius at work, catch up with one of the best kept secrets in literature
Download or read book Rabelais and His World written by Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.
Download or read book The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory written by Diane Oenning Thompson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-06-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diane Thompson's study focuses on the meaning and poetic function of memory in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and seeks to show how Dostoevsky used cultural memory to create a synthesis between his Christian ideal and art. Memory is considered not only as a theme or subject, but also as a principle of artistic composition.
Download or read book The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky written by Slav N. Gratchev and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from the angle of dialogism and polyphony. To begin with, although Mikhail Bakhtin considered Dostoevsky the “creator of a polyphonic novel,” we believe that the first elements of polyphony can be observed in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. A preliminary objective will therefore be to articulate, without reducing the role of Dostoevsky in the creation of the polyphonic novel and relying on Bakhtin’s interpretation of polyphony, heteroglossia, and multivoicedness, that the polyphonic structure appeared and evolved to a state of relative maturity centuries before Dostoevsky. The book will subsequently explore how and why the polyphonic structure was born within the classic monophonic structure of Don Quixote, the ways in which this new structure positioned itself in relation to the classic monophonic one, and what relations it may be said to have established with it resulting in a unique amalgam—the hybrid semi-polyphonic novel. An overarching concern throughout the project will be to trace Cervantes’ search for new and more sophisticated expressive possibilities that the old, monophonic narration could not offer, while also shedding light on how Cervantes systematically and deliberately employed polyphonic structure in Don Quixote.
Download or read book The Novel in the Age of Disintegration written by Kate Holland and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long been fascinated by the creative struggles with genre manifested throughout Dostoevsky’s career. In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland brings historical context to bear, showing that Dostoevsky wanted to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting disintegration brought on by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s. This required him to reinvent the genre. At the same time he sought to infuse his novels with the capacity to inspire belief in social and spiritual reintegration, so he returned to some older conventions of a society that was already becoming outmoded. In thoughtful readings of Demons, The Adolescent, A Writer’s Diary, and The Brothers Karamazov, Holland delineates Dostoevsky’s struggle to adapt a genre to the reality of the present, with all its upheavals, while maintaining a utopian vision of Russia’s future mission.
Download or read book Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self written by Yuri Corrigan and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form written by Greta Matzner-Gore and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky s Crime and Punishment written by Janet G. Tucker and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back “target readers”, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as text received orally, forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents’ arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol’nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.
Download or read book Speech Genres and Other Late Essays written by M. M. Bakhtin and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtin's Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.
Download or read book Dostoevsky s Secrets written by Carol Apollonio Flath and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
