Seminar in 19th Century Lit:

Catalog description

The seminar will examine the canonical strain of Russian realist fiction with an eye to the social and political imaginaries underpinning its discursive and mimetic field. How does the Russian realist tradition differ from its Western-European counterparts when it comes to the representation of the contemporary social dynamics? Can concepts developed in social and political theory illuminate this tradition’s stylistic, generic, and characterological patterns? Beginning with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s famous essay on Turgenev’s tale, Asya (1958), “The Russian on the Rendezvous” and focusing on the shapes taken by these works’ central romantic encounters, we will try to address these and related questions. We will discuss long and short prose works by F. Dostoevsky, A. Herzen, A. Pushkin, L. Tolstoy and I.Turgenev.