DOSTOEVSKY: BETWEEN MARGINALITY AND MADNESS (CL3056)

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The intellectual anti-heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels, novellas, and short stories from the period beginning in 1864 have left a more decisive and enduring mark on Western culture than those of any other Russian writer. The author’s struggles with poverty, poor health, imprisonment, epilepsy, and gambling led him to question the existence of any social, moral, or metaphysical order. His underground characters, divided between reason and will, confront lust, despair, schizophrenia, and insanity, sometimes descending into sado-masochism, rape, murder, and suicide. We will read this powerful fiction with an eye first to its Russian context and then to a sampling of its international repercussions (Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky; Faulkner, Sartre, Bernhard …).

Code: 
CL3056
Name: 
DOSTOEVSKY: BETWEEN MARGINALITY AND MADNESS
Discipline: 
CL (Comparative Literature)
Type: 
Regular
Level: 
Undergraduate
Credits: 
4
Can be taken twice for credit?: 
No
Pre-requisites: 
None
Co-requisites: 
None

Learning Outcomes

  1. To assimilate and apply relevant critical terminology.
  2. To develop coherent, well-structured analyses of the works under scrutiny.
  3. To discover the nature and place of Dostoevsky’s fiction in historical and international context.
  4. To engage with Russian and other masterworks from the nineteenth century to the present.
  5. To refine and polish essay-writing skills, both under time pressure and with research content.
  6. To situate representative texts and authors in Russian and comparative literary history.

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