Dostoevsky''s Provocateurs

Confronting Bakhtins formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readersand to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach
 
Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevskys deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtins foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevskys poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevskys provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity.
 
Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevskys Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource. See more