For Fyodor Dostoevsky, ways of seeing reflect ways of thinking about the world. This dissertation complements Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses of Dostoevsky’s poetics by taking a visual-aesthetic approach and exploring “visual polyphony,” a concept that Bakhtin used but did not develop at length. When Dostoevsky returned from nearly ten years in exile (1849-1858), his interest in aesthetics was acute. He had intended to write a treatise on art and Christianity, but that project never materialized. Dostoevsky did, however, explore visual matters in essays of the 1860s. And vision figures prominently in his post-Siberian fiction. Each of the three chapters in this dissertation focuses on vision in Dostoevsky’s writing. The first chapter analyzes two important aesthetic statements of Dostoevsky’s journal Vremia. The first is “Petersburg Visions: In Prose and Verse” wherein Dostoevsky’s narrator declares that he is a “dreamer,” a claim that also reveals the role of imagination in Dostoevsky’s special brand of realism. In “Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861,” Dostoevsky takes issue with the realism of the Academy’s prized painting, Valery Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt, for being too photographic in its servility to visual objectivity and outward appearance. These writings display Dostoevsky’s fascination with vision not as a passive observation, but as an active, subjective and complex process in which empirical data blends with existing narratives that dictate what the seer sees. In the second chapter, I show how Dostoevsky renders prison convicts empirically, yet empathetically in Notes from the house of the Dead (1861). The narrator Gorianchikov describes the eponymous notes as “scenes.” Through Gorianchikov, Dostoevsky maintains an exterior perspective relative to the peasant convicts’ thoughts. In this sense, Gorianchikov assumes the perspective of a realist painter, yet he manages to humanize the prisoners where Yakobi’s painting fails. This is especially evident in my analysis of what Gorianchikov calls a “strange picture,” which is his description of the prisoners gathered in anticipation of their annual Christmas theater performance. The characters of this novel number among the least psychologically penetrated in his fiction, yet Dostoevsky manages to indicate their interiority from without. In the third and final chapter, I examine Dostoevsky’s use of Holbein’s Dead Christ (1521) in The Idiot (1868). Drawing from Pavel Florensky’s explanations of Realism in visual art and reverse perspective in iconography from his article “Reverse Perspective,” I show how the Dead Christ combines Realist and reverse perspectival qualities. I use Bakhtin’s term “visual polyphony” to explain the special capacity of this painting to convey conflicting messages about Christ’s death and to elicit conflicting worldviews from Ippolit, Rogozhin and Myshkkin. The visually polyphonic painting plays a critical role in The Idiot, the most polyphonic of Dostoevsky’s novels. It reveals the visual dimensions to Dostoevsky’s polyphony: things look differently from different perspectives.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Advisers: Kevin Dunn; Lee Edelman. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 412-436). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Transformations of the Beautiful reexamines a problem that emerges during the mid-eighteenth century: the devaluation of the aesthetic category of the beautiful. In opposition to accounts that identify this problem with the rediscovery of the sublime, this dissertation emphasizes the crucial yet underexamined role that historicization played in the destabilization of beauty’s normative status in German aesthetic discourse. Additionally, I demonstrate that literary discourse became a key mode through which the beautiful’s problematic status was negotiated. Assembling literary texts from 1759-1817 that thematize beautiful objects or phenomena in terms of their historicity or instability, and transform them, I argue that these moments constitute discrete instances in which literature responds to the precarious position of beauty in modernity. With recourse to texts by Winckelmann, Schiller, Jean Paul, Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann and Eichendorff, I focus on the specific literary techniques employed by different genres—description, elegy, and narrative fiction—and how they reconfigure the relationship between the modern subject and the beautiful. In so doing I demonstrate how literary texts intervene in aesthetic discourse to reevaluate and generate alternative conceptions of the beautiful.

A central concept for Plato is the kalon – often translated as the beautiful, fine, admirable, or noble. This dissertation shows that only by prioritizing dimensions of beauty in the concept can we understand the nature, use, and insights of the kalon in Plato. The concept of the kalon organizes aspirations to appear and be admired as beautiful for one’s virtue. We may consider beauty superficial and concern for it vain – but what if it were also indispensable to living well? By analyzing how Plato uses the concept of the kalon to contest cultural practices of shame and honour regulated by ideals of beauty, we come to see not only the tensions within the concept but also how attractions to beauty steer, but can subvert, our attempts to live well.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 310 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-310).

This thesis examines the significant role of expressionist and minimalist visual aesthetics in the construction (imagery, structuring, language) and subsequent interpretation of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. While Sherrill Grace's Regression & Apocalypse the groundwork for a literary expressionist reading of Watson's novel, this study elaborates the crucial links between literary and painterly expressionism in the novel and suggests Watson's critique of the expressionist aesthetic. A reading of the minimalist aesthetic, as both an extension of and an alternative to the expressionist reading of the text, emphasizes the relevance of noniconic painterly strategies to the novel and, by implication, of alternate forms of spectatorship that are demanded by the text. This study ultimately shows how Watson creatively synthesizes these extremes of modernist visual aesthetics and asks for the reader's imaginative and critical engagement with the modernist arts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université Lyon 3, 1999-2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université Lyon 3, 1999-2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

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