The Novel in the Longue-Durée: Veselovsky and Bakhtin’s Competing Origin Stories
The Novel in the Longue-Durée: Veselovsky and Bakhtin’s Competing Origin Stories
73 Queens Park Crescent East, Northrop Frye Hall Room 113
Time: Apr 7th, 5:00 pm End: Apr 7th, 7:00 pm
Interest Categories: Slavic Studies (FAS), History (FAS), Historical Studies (UTM), Historical and Cultural Studies (UTSC), English and Drama (UTM), English (UTSC), English (FAS), Comparative Literature (FAS), 1800-1900
Lecture by Kate Holland, University of Toronto
The Comparative Literature Course Union presents the Winter edition of the Emerging Research in Comparative Literature Series
The Novel in the Longue-Durée: Veselovsky and Bakhtin's Competing Origin Stories a public lecture by Professor Kate Holland
Light refreshments will be provided
Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) was the founding father of Comparative Literature in Russia and pioneer of an approach to literary scholarship he called Historical Poetics, which sees literature as the formal expression of the social and psychological needs of peoples as they develop over deep time. Beginning with a discussion of Historical Poetics, this talk goes on to examine Veselovsky's history and theory of the novel, comparing his account of the genre's origins in the popular genres of late antiquity with Bakhtin's account of its roots in the dynamic heteroglossia of the disintegrating Roman Empire in "Discourse in the Novel" and "Epic and Novel."
Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and Genre in the 1870s (Northwestern University Press, 2013) and articles on articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sand, Zola and Veselovsky. She is currently coordinating a series of events in North America to mark the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. She is a founder member of the Working Group on Historical Poetics, and recently contributed to Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, edited by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (Fordham University Press, 2015).
This event is free and open to all. Registration is not required. For further information, please contact the Centre for Comparative Literature at (416) 813-4041