Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on the text
- 1 Memory and poetics
- 2 The fictional narrator
- 3 Memory and the system of ascending plots
- 4 The memories of the characters: forms of affirmative memory
- 5 The memories of the characters: forms of negative memory
- 6 Forgetting
- 7 Foretelling
- 8 The Christocentric poetic memory system
- 9 Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on the text
- 1 Memory and poetics
- 2 The fictional narrator
- 3 Memory and the system of ascending plots
- 4 The memories of the characters: forms of affirmative memory
- 5 The memories of the characters: forms of negative memory
- 6 Forgetting
- 7 Foretelling
- 8 The Christocentric poetic memory system
- 9 Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
This book is an interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov based on a study of the meaning and poetic function of memory in the novel. Aristotle said in the Poetics that all people experience the ‘greatest of pleasures’ when contemplating a work of imitation because they are at the same time ‘learning something’, which he calls ‘gathering the meaning of things’. Establishing, illuminating and ordering meanings is the primary goal of literary interpretation. An emphasis on poetics requires that we focus on the text of The Brothers Karamazov as a system of mutually connected elements in order to discover the aesthetic principles of their interrelation. Poetics and interpretation are in fact complementary activities. Poetics studies how an artistic text is constructed, interpretation strives to reveal its meanings.
Memory, in its broadest sense, is the general category of what remains of the past. The past is inscribed in memory, individual and cultural. Every individual retains in memory traces of his or her own past experience which can become the subject of an artistic representation. There are also supra-individual memories shared by all people in a given culture and extending over generations. This study attempts to identify those aspects of cultural memory Dostoevsky variously incorporated into his novel, to analyse how he used them as significant components of the individual memories he created for his characters, and to explore the dialogic interactions between them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory , pp. xi - xvPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991