Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts

Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts
Author: Michael Sperber
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0761849939

This book examines the arts over the course of modern history to illuminate psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and how these disciplines may elucidate works of literature, art, and cinema. These essays propose a paradigm shift in psychiatry, based on the idea that some symptoms of mental illness may have constructive uses.

Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts

Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts
Author: Michael Sperber
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2010-04-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0761849947

In Dostoyevsky's Stalker, we discover how the arts may illuminate psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as well as how these disciplines may elucidate works of literature, art, and cinema. Examining a diversity of authors, artists, historical figures, and psychopaths over the course of modern history, this groundbreaking collection of essays proposes a paradigm shift in psychiatry, based on the idea that some symptoms of mental illness may have constructive uses and may be used by the sufferer for mental and spiritual growth instead of going untreated or else being 'analyzed away.'

Translating Cain

Translating Cain
Author: Samantha Joo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1978709854

Unless we recognize the cultural context embedded in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, the significance of Cain’s rejection and consequent violence is often lost in translation. While many interpreters highlight the theme of sibling rivalry to explain Cain’s murderous violence, Samantha Joo relates Cain’s anger and shame to the social marginalization of Kenites in ancient Israel, for whom Cain functions narratively as an ancestor. To better understand and experience Cain’s emotions in the narrative, Joo provides a method for re-contextualizing an ancient story in modern contexts. Drawing from post-colonial theories of Latin America translators, Joo focuses on analogies which simulate the “moveable event” of a story. She shows that novels like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright’s Native Son, in which protagonists kill to escape their invisibility, capture the “event” of Cain and Abel. Consequently, readers can empathize with the anger and shame resulting from the social marginalization of Cain through the alienation of a poor, ex-university student, Raskolnikov, and the oppression of a young black man, Bigger Thomas.

Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions

Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions
Author: Caroline A. Brown
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2017-11-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319581279

This collection chronicles the strategic uses of madness in works by black women fiction writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Moving from an over-reliance on the “madwoman” as a romanticized figure constructed in opposition to the status quo, contributors to this volume examine how black women authors use madness, trauma, mental illness, and psychopathology as a refraction of cultural contradictions, psychosocial fissures, and political tensions of the larger social systems in which their diverse literary works are set through a cultural studies approach. The volume is constructed in three sections: Revisiting the Archive, Reinscribing Its Texts: Slavery and Madness as Historical Contestation, The Contradictions of Witnessing in Conflict Zones: Trauma and Testimony, and Novel Form, Mythic Space: Syncretic Rituals as Healing Balm. The novels under review re-envision the initial trauma of slavery and imperialism, both acknowledging the impact of these events on diasporic populations and expanding the discourse beyond that framework. Through madness and healing as sites of psychic return, these novels become contemporary parables of cultural resistance.

Play Among Books

Play Among Books
Author: Miro Roman
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2021-12-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3035624054

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

Dimensions of Laughter in Crime and Punishment

Dimensions of Laughter in Crime and Punishment
Author: John Spiegel
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781575910376

"Since human laughter served, in a sense, as Dostoevsky's model, the author pays some heed to the highly controversial subject of real-life laughter, along with the leading theories that seek to elucidate its causes and implications.".

The Myth of the Non-Russian

The Myth of the Non-Russian
Author: Erika Haber
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780739105313

Erika Haber's analysis of the interplay between literature and culture in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s breaks new ground not only in our understanding of this relationship, but also in our appreciation of the literary genre popularized at that time by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garc a M rquez--magical realism. The Soviets perceived Garc a M rquez as a Socialist, and they sanctioned his magical realism--when other writing styles were outlawed--as a natural extension of socialist realism. Haber discusses the use of magical realism in Soviet literature, focusing especially on two non-Slavic writers: Fasil Iskander, of Abkhazia, and Chingiz Aitmatov, of Kyrgyzstan. She explores how these writers used literary tools of subversion and successfully employed magical realism in rebellion against the prescription of national conformity in art. In critical readings of Iskander and Aitmatov, Haber demonstrates how these writers juxtaposed their native myth with Soviet myth, thus undermining the primary message of socialist realism by suggesting a plurality of worlds and truths.

Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story

Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story
Author: Jeff Birkenstein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2021-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793629897

In Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, editors Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein have assembled a collection of eighteen original essays written by literary critics from around the globe. Collectively, these critics argue that the reciprocal influence between Russian and American writers is integral to the development of the short story in each country as well as vital to the global status the contemporary short story has attained. This collection provides original analyses of both well-known Russian and American stories as well as some that might be more unfamiliar. Each essay is purposely crafted to display an appreciation of the techniques, subject matter, themes, and approaches that both Russian and American short story writers explored across borders and time. Stories by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Krzhizhanovsky as well as short stories by Washington Irving, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates populate this essential, multivalent collection. Perhaps more important now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, these essays will remind readers how much Russian and American culture share, as well as the extent to which their respective literatures are deeply intertwined.

Dostoevsky as Suicidologist

Dostoevsky as Suicidologist
Author: Amy D. Ronner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793607826

In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim’s etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in Dostoevsky scholarship, but provides fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s major works, including Notes from The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Ronner provides an exegesis of how Dostoevsky’s implicit awareness of fatalistic, altruistic, egoistic, and anomic modes of self-destruction helped shape not only his philosophy, but also his craft as a writer. In this study, Ronner contributes to the field of suicidology by anatomizing both self-destructive behavior and suicidal ideation while offering ways to think about prevention. But most expansively, Ronner tackles the formidable task of forging a ligature between artistic creation and the pluripresent social fact of self-annihilation.

Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault

Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault
Author: Nicholas Dungey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781498550444

Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault: Power, Resistance, and the Art of Self-Creation engages with important themes such as power, language, subjectivity and the possibility of fully developed postmodern account of the subject, resistance to power, and an aesthetic interpretation of life.