The Russian Urban Novel in English Translation

Catalog description

This course investigates the interaction of the theme of the City and the genre of the novel through the analysis of texts in which the City is not merely a background but rather an active character, exercising a determining influence on the fate and psychic stability of its population. Concentrating on Russian novels, but in a comparative context, the image of the City is traced thorugh changing historical periods and literary styles in an attempt to discover how the specific literary and physical characteristics of each city affect the formal structure of the novels that depict it. We will see how Dostoevsky built on Dickens' Oliver Twist and Balzac's Le Pere Goriot to create a more complex form of ""Romantic Realism"" in Crime and Punishment. We continue with Belyi's Peterburg, which Nabokov considered the most important modernist novel after Joyce's Ulysses, and Zamiatin's We, the urban anti-utopia that was a source for 1984 and Brave New World. The course will conclude either with Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, who declared Dostoevsky to be his literary ancestor, or with Camus' La Chute [The Fall], which is a direct response to Notes from