In English. No prerequisites.
cross-listed with Comparative Literature 01:195:311:01
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) invented some of the most vivid and tenacious characters in world literature: murderers, madmen and -women, terrorists, prostitutes, gamblers, saints. Many of his eerily modern insights stemmed from his fear of a world without God—a condition that he rejected on moral grounds, but which he compellingly represented in his fiction. This course traces Dostoevsky’s career as a literary celebrity, political prisoner, traveler, journalist, and religious and nationalist thinker. Most of all, we will consider him as a novelist who pushed the genre to its outermost formal and philosophical bounds. We’ll read works including Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), and Demons (1871–72).
All readings and discussions in English. No prerequisites. Fulfills SAS Core goals AHo, AHp.