Narrative ethics in the first-person prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Witold Gombrowicz
By: by Alex Spektor
Published: 2008
Language: eng
Number of pages: 234
Description: In my dissertation on narrative ethics in the first-person prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Witold Gombrowicz, I develop a methodology which, taking into account the formal features of narrative, allows us to talk about the ethical parameters specific to literary fiction. I see narrative ethics both as a theoretical field that investigates literature's unique place in ethical discourse, and as a discussion of ethics born through one's engagement with a specific literary work. In my research I engage and am guided by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, Geoffrey Harpham, Charles Altieri and Adam Zachary Newton, among others. In their work these scholars concentrate on the intersubjective relationship that narrative fiction establishes between authors and their readers, narrators and their listeners. As Adam Newton proposes, the conceptual core of narrative ethics consists of a triadic structure: "(1) a narrational ethics (...signifying the exigent conditions and consequences of the narrative act itself); (2) a representational ethics (the costs incurred in fictionalizing oneself or others by exchanging 'person' for 'character'); and (3) a hermeneutic ethics (the ethico-critical accountability which acts of reading hold their readers to)." 1 In the dissertation I study narrative ethics in the first-person prose works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Witold Gombrowicz. I chose these two writers because I believe that it is through an "ethical reading" of their prose that one can effectively study narrative's contribution to contemporary ethical debate. Both problematize the process of intersubjective narrative representation. Dostoevsky accomplishes this by intensifying the "ethical tension" of the narrative act itself, setting it within non-verbal frames of Christian acts of compassion and acts of physical violence.

His characters' criminal path often starts with their desire to usurp narrative authority; and throughout his fiction, one rarely finds narrators who are willing to tolerate sharing narrative space with others. At the same time, the reader is left with an uneasy task of having to accept responsibility precisely for interpreting the text that has just warned of the moral dangers of narrative interpretation. My choice of Gombrowicz as Dostoevsky's "distant interlocutor"--to use Mandel'shtam's expression--is determined less by the direct references he makes to Dostoevsky, than by correspondences between ethical claims made in their prose. If Dostoevsky's prose tests the limits of narrative ethics by questioning the possibility of ethical narratives, Gombrowicz searches for ways in which a narrative--as its risks are exposed--can still produce a humanistic response. "Ethics," as Michel de Certeau wrote, "defines a distance between what is and what ought to be... [which] designates a space where we have something to do." 2 Similarly, I would argue, the authors in my dissertation create a narrative space within which their characters have something to do - namely, seek salvation. Through the intersubjective narrative exchanges between characters Dostoevsky and Gombrowicz expose their characters' compromised ethics - while, at the same time, showing how their narratives are driven by a genuine search for a society in which salvation is not reached at the expense of others.

1 Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 17- 18. 2 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
Notes: "October 2008."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures)--Harvard University, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references.