BASC50045 - The Ends of Reading: Brothers Karamazov

Course Description

This course is a year-long sequence—a close, "deep" reading of Dostoyevsky's monumental work, combined with reading and consideration of seminal reinterpretations and critical commentaries (e.g., Woolf, Kafka, Freud, Hesse, Sartre, and Camus—together with selections from more contemporary scholarly criticism).

The first two quarters will be devoted to the actual reading of the text; the final quarter to significant appropriations of and influential, critical commentaries on it.

The point is not only to do a close reading and discussion of the text, but to reflect on how reading classic works of literature can lead to specific kinds of knowledge—and the kinds of knowledge it might lead to.

Course Outline

Notes

Texts:

Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy Anchor; Reprint edition (October 1, 1990),• ISBN 978-0385073059

Camus, Albert, The Rebel (Bower trans., Vintage; Reissue edition, 1992),  ISBN 978-0679733843

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.),  ISBN 978-0393926330

Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Strachey trans., Norton, Standard edition 1989),  ISBN 978-0393008319

Sartre, J. P., Existentialism is a Humanism (Macomber trans., Yale, Reprint edition 2007),  ISBN 978-0300115468