Sentenced to life: Writing the self in Dostoevsky and James
Item
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Title
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Sentenced to life: Writing the self in Dostoevsky and James
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b7b381ffbeb9:11740
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identifier
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12358
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Creator
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Mendelevich, Evelina,
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Contributor
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Andre Aciman
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Comparative literature | Slavic literature | American literature | Dostoevsky | Henry James | Psychological fiction | The Idiot | Wings of the Dove
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Abstract
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This thesis is the first full-length study to compare Dostoevsky's and James's mutually illuminating concepts of art and its relation to life. It examines Dostoevsky's and James's artistic and intellectual kinship through the hitherto overlooked structural and thematic parallels between their fiction and criticism. Both authors distinguish between two concepts of reality: the external, objective reality---the raw material of life, infinitely rich and abundant, but ultimately meaningless in its indiscriminate inclusiveness; and what James calls the "transmuted real," reality rendered meaningful through individual perception and experience and reflected in art. When it comes to the inner reality of the self, one finds in the fiction of Dostoevsky and James the same distinction between the "raw" material of interior reality, indeterminate and "unfinalizable," and the meaningful social identity formed in the process of self-actualization---the creative effort of life-writing.;Dostoevsky's "White Nights" and James's "The Beast in the Jungle" are examples of failure at life-writing resulting from individual consciousness' disengagement and isolation from external world. Concerned as they are with the inner workings of the psyche, Dostoevsky and James nevertheless stress that a living consciousness is characterised by interaction, i.e. it is always conscious of other consciousnesses. Yet Daisy Miller and Notes from the Underground dramatize the problems inherent in such interaction. Both novellas focus on the discrepancy between the essential indeterminacy of the self and the social and cultural identities through which it is allowed to express itself in a social setting. The freedom to preserve indeterminacy and potentiality is presented in both novellas as the chief law of life, yet indeterminacy is incompatible with communal living. In The Idiot and The Wings of the Dove, Dostoevsky and James present artistic imagination and such forms of literary activity as plotting, scripting, reading and narrating as essential parts of self-scripting strategies of the characters confronted with this predicament. Despite Myshkin's and Milly's failures as heroes, they nevertheless succeed in realizing their artistic potential, embodying art's capacity for reconciling the self's vital impulses for being and for seeing, and therefore for meeting both aesthetic and ethical demands of life.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
