Достоевский

[Игорь Николаевич]

Wednesday, September 23 @ 4:00 p.m. Woodard Room 5 UBC

Dr. Ralph C. Wood, Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University

Public Lecture: “Dostoevsky''s 'The Brothers Karamazov' as the Premier Novel of the Modern World"

Abstract

The literary critic Harold Bloom once defined a classic as a book that requires us permanently to rearrange the furniture of our lives. He meant, I suspect, that such a text prevents us from viewing the world through conventional lenses; it requires us not only to see the world with cleansed vision but also to reorder our lives accordingly. T. S. Eliot
defined literary greatness in similar terms. "The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante's [Divine Comedy] is one of those [texts] which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life." Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is another. I suspect that it has caused more readers of various types and commitments to redefine themselves both morally and
spiritually than has any other book, excepting only Dante's.

Biography

Ralph C. Wood is Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. He won the Jon Reinhardt Award for Distinguished Teaching, Wake Forest University and was one of twelve scholars in the American Literature and Religion Project (Pew Trust & Erasmus Institute of Notre Dame). His major book, published in 1988 by the University of Notre Dame Press, is entitled The Comedy of Redemption:
Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries).