Достоевский и мировая культура: Филологический журнал (Mar 2023)
The Teaching of Literary Theory through the Shock of Not Understanding the Text. Crime and Punishment
Abstract
This article presents an exercise in the close reading of two adjacent small chapters in Crime and Punishment — 3 and 4, in Part One of the Novel — Raskolnikov’s Mother’s letter and her son’s reaction to it, respectively. The exercise consists of two activities — homework preparation and its discussion in the classroom. The homework consists of a series of questions as reading guidelines, training the students to look for evidence in the text. These guidelines aim at alerting the students to the speaker’s and the listener’s respective attitudes to what matters to each about the topic of their conversation or, no less importantly, about what they deliberately omit: 1. the use of pronouns — personal as well as demonstrative and adverbial: Pointing to what matters instead of naming it, pronouns allow for a shift of referents. This, paradoxically, makes them more “loaded,” entailing a “naked,” shockingly direct, demonstration of attitude clashes. This requires a semiotic approach regarding deixis. 2. ostranenie/defamiliarization of these attitudes: the students initially presume that they understand what ails or concerns the characters but then discover how different their actual sore spots are — not merely from those presumed by the reader but from one another. Here, Russian Formalist Theory may come handy. 3. polyphony in Bakhtin’s sense — when the discourse offered by one speaker or character becomes re-accentuated by another, in both the way they listen and register the speech and the way they respond to it. Thus the theoretic approaches the students will use will be deliberately eclectic — whatever fits the purpose for the task at hand. The purpose of this exercise is two-fold. On the one hand, it makes theoretical approach relevant. The students begin to apply Literary Theories as instruments for understanding the text, rather than “worshipping” theory as the goal of their exercise in literary studies. On the other hand, it lets close readings counter any ideological reductionism. As the students develop their own interpretive skills, they also build up resistance to brain-washing or pre-digested interpretations, or to any attempted surrogates for their unmediated encounter with the primary text. The skill the students will thus acquire will be free, independent critical thinking. This, in turn, will re-invigorate their sense of Dostoevsky’s relevance, both ethical and aesthetic.
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