Foreign Lit/Classics, 3/02, Period 2

[game-of-you.livejournal.com]

"Hello.

As we discussed Monday, you should turn in the written portions of your midterms today. They are to be critical reactions to the appropriate readings, 100 words for Classics students, 200 words for Foreign Literature.

Miss Santos, Mr. Dane, and Miss Bristow, you have been granted extensions to the end of break to complete these. Email them to me by March 10.

After you have turned in your papers, you may watch a film.

I will see you on the 13th, when Classics students will begin studying Latin and literature students will commence reading Asian literature."

Comments

Re: Midterms, Classics/Foreign Lit

[notcalledlizzie.livejournal.com]

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was one of the greatest of Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. Often featuring characters with disparate and extreme states of the mind, his works exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human psychology as well as penetrating analyses in the politics, social and spiritual state of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic as precursors of modern-day thought and preoccupations. He is sometimes said to be a founder of existentialism, most notably in Notes from Underground, which has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written".

Dostoevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and this enables the author to get rid of one of the dominant traits of realist prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux — his characters primarily embody spiritual values, and these are, by definition, timeless. Other obsessive themes include suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering (the most important motif), rejection of the West and affirmation of Russian Orthodoxy and Tsarism. Literary scholars such as Bakhtin have characterized his work as 'polyphonic': unlike other novelists, Dostoevsky does not appear to aim for a 'single vision', and beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.

By common critical consensus one among the handful of universal world authors, Dostoevsky has decisively influenced twentieth century literature, existentialism and expressionism in particular.


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