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9780810141988

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Well written and well structured, Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form draws from recent strains in the fields of narrative ethics and Dostoevsky scholarship yet also strikes out on its own, providing fresh readings of familiar texts, often from unexpected angles. - Kate Holland, author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form addresses some of the most important questions we face today: Why read literature? Why read Dostoevsky, or, in other words, why read novels from a far away time and place? Matzner-Gore not only poses these questions cogently, she also arrives at persuasive answers. - Susan McReynolds, author of Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism In this lively and engaging book, Greta Matzner-Gore advances an insightful and compelling interpretation of the formal problems of Dostoevsky's final three novels. Focusing on the theme curiosity and voyeurism, the question of endings and openness, and the problems of marginalization, her masterful analysis of narrative dysfunction and distortion sheds exciting new light on the ethics of Dostoevsky's texts, and their readers. - Sarah J. Young, author of Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting

In this lively and engaging book, Greta Matzner-Gore advances an insightful and compelling interpretation of the formal problems of Dostoevsky's final three novels. Focusing on the theme curiosity and voyeurism, the question of endings and openness, and the problems of marginalization, her masterful analysis of narrative dysfunction and distortion sheds exciting new light on the ethics of Dostoevsky's texts, and their readers. --Sarah J. Young, author of Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting We might think that the natural Dostoevskian site for studying suspense is Crime and Punishment. But that earlier masterpiece, or so it would appear, is too tight and clean, too private, its interlocutors too isolated and one-on-one. Dostoevsky needed to mature into the knowledge that curiosity is not only a cognitive impulse but also a spiritual one. In his sprawling Demons, societal contamination is greater . . . In a luminous argument that supplements Alexander Spektor on silences in The Idiot and Denis Zhernokleyev's recent work on the fallen genre of the feuilleton, Matzner-Gore shows how the appetite to know stretches along an ethical spectrum from greedy, uncontrolled curiosity (Dostoevsky's gossips, eavesdroppers, and spies) to the minimal but necessarily intimate information required to activate the dialogic relations of empathy and compassion. --Caryl Emerson, Russian Review Well written and well structured, Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form draws from recent strains in the fields of narrative ethics and Dostoevsky scholarship yet also strikes out on its own, providing fresh readings of familiar texts, often from unexpected angles. --Kate Holland, author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form addresses some of the most important questions we face today: Why read literature? Why read Dostoevsky, or, in other words, why read novels from a far away time and place? Matzner-Gore not only poses these questions cogently, she also arrives at persuasive answers. --Susan McReynolds, author of Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism

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Greta Matzner-Gore is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California.

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