Overview

Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience. Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its structures, preoccupations, and strategies of representation critical details about how and when a work came into being. Through a rich reading of Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Belknap explores the spatial, chronological, and causal aspects of plot, its brilliant manipulation of reader frustration and involvement, and its critical cohesion of characters. He considers Shakespeare's transformation of dramatic plot through parallelism, conflict, resolution, and recognition. He then follows with Dostoevsky's development of the rhetorical and moral devices of nineteenth-century Russian fiction, along with its epistolary and detective genres, to embed the reader in the murder Raskolnikov commits. Dostoevsky's reinvention of the psychological plot was profound, and Belknap effectively challenges the idea that the author abused causality to achieve his ideological conclusion. In a final chapter, Belknap argues that plots teach us novelistic rather than poetic justice. Operating according to their own logic, plots provide us with a compelling way to see and order our world.

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9780231177825

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This is an almost perfect book, by one of this country's great scholar-teachers, on why the literary art of arranging episodes matters to us. Not only luminously smart but also perfectly plotted; each detail of its structure, chronological argument, and diction has been arranged to reinforce its message. -- Caryl Emerson, Princeton University This is a brilliant piece of work, well-written, and insightful - a sheer pleasure to follow. Belknap's definitions of the terms of Russian Formalism are clearer than anyone else's, and his sense of what they suggest is richer. -- Gary Morson, Northwestern University

Author Information

Robert L. Belknap (1929-2014) was professor of Slavic languages and a former dean of Columbia University. He authored two major studies of Dostoevsky's masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov: The Structure of ""The Brothers Karamazov"" (1989) and Genesis of ""The Brothers Karamazov"": The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text (1990).

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