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with James Wood, literary critic for The London Review of Books and The New Republic / Devlin Hall 008

Just to what degree Dostoyevsky's thoughts paralleled those of the Slavophiles will be outlined in subsequent chapters in three major areas--Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. Uvarov's old 1828 formula provides a simple outline in which to describe and compare the more complicated core of Dostoyevskyan and Slavophile philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Peter Kreeft / In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov was convinced it is not right that there is so much suffering in the world, and was convinced nothing could make it right. As a result he was left with no choice but to reject the ticket for this world, or to be indignant toward the world, which means he was indignant toward life in it. If we listen closely to what Fyodor Dostoevksy had to say in five of his works, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Insulted and Injured, and Notes from the Underground, we will find a way in which we can accept the ticket, which is to say that we will find a way to love life. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

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This thesis explores narrative as a self-reflexive commentary on the conditions of its own production. It argues that the need for narratives to perform economic functions, such as to provide an income for the author or to promote subscription to a host publication, affects how texts are written. It suggests that this approach is particularly suited to nineteenth-century prose fiction. It proposes a methodology for approaching this analysis based on treating the text as an exchange commodity in a transaction between author and reader whose economic function can be investigated and analysed. The thesis illustrates the application of this approach to major works of three nineteenth-century authors, following the evolution of the book format in France from its subordination to the roman-feuilleton in the late 1830s to its revival as an economically independent format in the 1880s, and contrasting this to the situation in contemporary Russia. A chapter on Balzac, which focusses on Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, shows how this work can be seen as both a mirror of the rapidly evolving world of publishing during the 1830s and 1840s and as an extended discussion on the constituents of narrative value. It demonstrates how Balzac first adopts, then rejects and parodies, literary devices developed for the rapidly commercialising world of the roman-feuilleton. A chapter on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, serialised in 1879-80, examines how an author could develop strategies to create literary and economic value within a contemporary readership which was far less developed than that in France. It demonstrates how important literary devices which Dostoevsky uses can be shown to have economic as well as aesthetic effect. The thesis concludes by an analysis of Zola's role in the industrialisation of narrative, which mirrors the rise of the story itself as a key tool of commercialisation. It illustrates this by a discussion of L'Argent (1891) as an allegory of the rise of the story as big business. The thesis promotes the relevance of economic criticism as an underrecognised critical discipline.

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The famous Japanese critic, Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), passed through five broad stages up to 1945. In the first stage (1929–32), he sought to reinstate the claims of “the man,” the feeling, thinking human being, in writing, in place of the various literary dogmas adopted from the West: “Behind literature, see the man.” In the second stage, (1933–37), he attempted to define the “modern individual” in a Japanese society of change, anxiety and chaos, adopting the term the “socialized I” to explain his sense of a self integrated into society. In this period he sought a model in the West and found Dostoevsky. The impetus behind this stage can be summed up in the saying, “Behind the man, see society.” In Stage 3 (1938–39), Kobayashi concluded that the “silence” of Japanese people expressed a “wisdom” that accepted the “inevitable” or their “fate” in history. This stage can be summarized in the dictum “Behind society, see history.” Kobayashi’s key direction in stage four (1940–41) is “Behind history, see nature,” the latter term meaning nature (fused with humankind). In the fifth stage, from 1942 into the postwar period, Kobayashi adopted a Dostoevskian “harmony and serenity” in espousing a transcendence of the human realm, when the human organism in its greatest struggles sees the need for beauty in art. This stage can be summed up in the saying “Behind nature, see (that which inspires) beautiful literature.” The thesis charts these five stages with biographical material, some of it gleaned from interviews, and with analyses of Kobayashi’s works, as well as works by Dostoevsky, the alter-ego of Kobayashi from 1933–43. Kobayashi emerges as a figure who lived a complex series of intellectual and personal changes, in strong reaction to the revolutionary political and cultural transformations in prewar Japan. / PhD Doctorate

As a reassessment of the southern grotesque, this dissertation places Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner in context and conversation with the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. While many southern artists and intellectuals have testified to his importance as a creative model and personal inspiration, Dostoevsky’s relationship to southern writers has rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s deeply positive understanding of grotesque realism, I see the grotesque as an empowering aesthetic strategy that, for O’Connor, McCullers, and Faulkner, captured their characters’ unfinished struggles to achieve renewal despite alienation and pain. My project suggests that the preponderance of a specific type of character in their fiction—a physically or mentally deformed outsider—accounts for both the distinctiveness of the southern grotesque and its affinity with Dostoevsky’s artistic approach. His grotesque characters, consequently, can fruitfully illuminate the misfits, mystics, and madmen who stand at the heart—and the margins—of modern southern fiction. By locating one source of the southern grotesque in Dostoevsky’s fiction, I assume that the southern literary imagination is not directed incestuously inward toward its southern past but also outward beyond the nation or even the hemisphere. This study thus offers one of the first evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between the city and the individual in literature, thereby acknowledging the anthropomorphic qualities we endow with our cities and in turn, how these qualities consolidate into the trope of the city character. We build this understanding by discussing the social, moral, political, literary, etc. associations of the city, and how these lend themselves to expressions of human energy or reflections of human character. These understandings are then given form through close readings of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.